We consider the problem of finding an approximate solution to $\ell_1$ regression while only observing a small number of labels. Given an $n \times d$ unlabeled data matrix $X$, we must choose a small set of $m \ll n$ rows to observe the labels of, then output an estimate $\widehatβ$ whose error on the original problem is within a $1 + \varepsilon$ factor of optimal. We show that sampling from $X$ according to its Lewis weights and outputting the empirical minimizer succeeds with probability $1-δ$ for $m > O(\frac{1}{\varepsilon^2} d \log \frac{d}{\varepsilon δ})$. This is analogous to the performance of sampling according to leverage scores for $\ell_2$ regression, but with exponentially better dependence on $δ$. We also give a corresponding lower bound of $Ω(\frac{d}{\varepsilon^2} + (d + \frac{1}{\varepsilon^2}) \log\frac{1}δ)$.