Nina Totenberg
Nina Totenberg is NPR's award-winning legal affairs correspondent. Her reports air regularly on NPR's critically acclaimed newsmagazines All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Weekend Edition.
Totenberg's coverage of the Supreme Court and legal affairs has won her widespread recognition. She is often featured in documentaries — most recently RBG — that deal with issues before the court. As Newsweek put it, "The mainstays [of NPR] are Morning Edition and All Things Considered. But the creme de la creme is Nina Totenberg."
In 1991, her ground-breaking report about University of Oklahoma Law Professor Anita Hill's allegations of sexual harassment by Judge Clarence Thomas led the Senate Judiciary Committee to re-open Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation hearings to consider Hill's charges. NPR received the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award for its gavel-to-gavel coverage — anchored by Totenberg — of both the original hearings and the inquiry into Anita Hill's allegations, and for Totenberg's reports and exclusive interview with Hill.
That same coverage earned Totenberg additional awards, including the Long Island University George Polk Award for excellence in journalism; the Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for investigative reporting; the Carr Van Anda Award from the Scripps School of Journalism; and the prestigious Joan S. Barone Award for excellence in Washington-based national affairs/public policy reporting, which also acknowledged her coverage of Justice Thurgood Marshall's retirement.
Totenberg was named Broadcaster of the Year and honored with the 1998 Sol Taishoff Award for Excellence in Broadcasting from the National Press Foundation. She is the first radio journalist to receive the award. She is also the recipient of the American Judicature Society's first-ever award honoring a career body of work in the field of journalism and the law. In 1988, Totenberg won the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton for her coverage of Supreme Court nominations. The jurors of the award stated, "Ms. Totenberg broke the story of Judge (Douglas) Ginsburg's use of marijuana, raising issues of changing social values and credibility with careful perspective under deadline pressure."
Totenberg has been honored seven times by the American Bar Association for continued excellence in legal reporting and has received more than two dozen honorary degrees. On a lighter note, Esquire magazine twice named her one of the "Women We Love."
A frequent contributor on TV shows, she has also written for major newspapers and periodicals — among them, The New York Times Magazine, The Harvard Law Review, The Christian Science Monitor, and New York Magazine, and others.
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The decision likely ensures that the case against Trump won’t be tried before the election, and then only if he is not reelected. -
Sandra Day O'Connor was called "the most powerful woman in America" during her quarter of a century as a Supreme Court justice. -
The court ruled 6-3 long ideological lines that the First Amendment bars Colorado from "forcing a website designer to create expressive designs speaking messages with which the designer disagrees." -
The case pitted prospective adoptive parents and Texas against the act, a federal law aimed at preventing Native American children from being separated from their extended families and their tribes. -
The U.S. Supreme Court placed new restrictions on the scope of the jurisdiction the Clean Water Act has over wetlands, ruling in favor of Idaho landowners who had challenged the law. -
The Supreme Court has left the case in the hands of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has scheduled oral arguments in the case for May 17. -
A majority of the court's conservatives indicating great skepticism over the president's loan-forgiveness plan. -
On Tuesday, the justices will hear expedited arguments in a challenge to the Biden plan brought by six states — Missouri, Nebraska, Iowa, Arkansas, Kansas and South Carolina. -
In the court Wednesday, lawyers for the state of Texas and for non-Native adoptive parents told the justices that ICWA violates the Constitution by discriminating based on race -
The justices are re-examining decades of precedent allowing affirmative action policies. This time, however, there is every likelihood that the court will overrule some or all of those precedents.
