Joseph Anthony Lewis (March 27, 1927 – March 25, 2013) was an American public intellectual and journalist. He was a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and was a columnist for The New York Times. He is credited with creating the field of legal journalism in the United States.

Early in Lewis' career as a legal journalist, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter told an editor of The New York Times: "I can't believe what this young man achieved. There are not two justices of this court who have such a grasp of these cases." At his death, Nicholas B. Lemann, the dean of Columbia University School of Journalism, said: "At a liberal moment in American history, he was one of the defining liberal voices."

Lewis was born Joseph Anthony Lewis in New York City on March 27, 1927, to Kassel Lewis, who worked in textiles manufacturing, and Sylvia Surut, who became director of the nursery school at the 92nd Street Y. He and his family were Jewish. He attended the Horace Mann School in the Bronx, where he was a classmate of Roy Cohn, and graduated from Harvard College in 1948. While at Harvard, he was managing editor of The Harvard Crimson.

Following his college graduation, Lewis worked for The New York Times. He left in 1952 to work for the Democratic National Committee on Adlai Stevenson's presidential campaign. He returned to journalism at The Washington Daily News, an afternoon tabloid. He wrote a series of articles on the case of Abraham Chasanow, a civilian employee of the U.S. Navy, who had been dismissed from his job on the basis of allegations by anonymous informers that he associated with anti-American subversives. The series won Lewis a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1955.

Lewis returned to The New York Times that year as its Washington bureau chief. He was assigned to cover the Justice Department and the Supreme Court. In 1956–57 he was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard Law School. He won a second Pulitzer Prize in 1963, again in the category National Reporting, for his coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court. The citation singled out his coverage of the court's reasoning in Baker v. Carr, a Supreme Court decision which held that federal courts could exercise authority over legislative redistricting on the part of the states, and the decision's impact on specific states.

In his 1969 history of The New York Times, Gay Talese described Lewis in his Washington years as "cool, lean, well-scrubbed looking, intense and brilliant". Lewis became a member of Senator Robert F. Kennedy's social circle, too conspicuously so in the opinion of Max Frankel, another of the paper's editors.

During a four-month newspaper strike (November 1962 to February 1963), Lewis wrote Gideon's Trumpet, the story of Clarence Earl Gideon, the plaintiff in Gideon v. Wainwright, the 1963 case in which the Supreme Court held that states were required to provide counsel for indigent defendants charged with serious crimes. At Lewis' death it had not been out of print since it was first published. It won the 1965 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime and in 1980 was adapted as a movie for television and presented by Hallmark Hall of Fame. Lewis played a small role in the film.^{[citation needed]}

Lewis published a second book in 1964, Portrait of a Decade: The Second American Revolution, about the civil rights movement. In 1991, Mr. Lewis published Make No Law, an account of The New York Times v. Sullivan, the 1964 Supreme Court decision that revolutionized American libel law. In Sullivan, the court held that public officials suing critics of their official conduct needed to prove that the contested statement(s) were made with "actual malice", that is, with knowledge that it was false or with "reckless disregard" of whether it was true or not.