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.
-
By a vote of 6-to-3 on Thursday the Supreme Court's conservative majority made it far more difficult to challenge voting restrictions throughout the country.
-
The U.S. Supreme Court largely gutted what remains of the landmark Voting Rights Act, once hailed as one of the most effective civil rights legislation in U.S. history.
-
The justices, in a 6-3 opinion, narrowed the only major section of the landmark Voting Rights Act that remains in effect. -
The court left in place a lower court decision declaring that local school boards may not require transgender high school students to use bathrooms that correspond to their sex listed at birth.
-
At issue was a California law allowing union organizers to enter farms to speak to workers during nonworking hours for a set number of days each year.
-
The U.S. Supreme Court sided with students on Wednesday, ruling that a former cheerleader's online F-bombs about her school is protected speech under the First Amendment.
-
The case involved a teenage cheerleader who dropped F-bombs on Snapchat. At issue was whether schools may punish students for speech that occurs online and off campus but that may be disruptive.
-
Faced with the prospect of reshaping college athletics, the U.S. Supreme Court issued potentially transformative ruling Monday in a case that pitted college athletes against the NCAA.
-
The court ruled that NCAA rules are not reasonably necessary to distinguish between college and professional sports. Still, the ruling could be potentially transformative.
-
The decision marks a triumph for a new brand of conservatism on the court, which is putting the Constitution's guarantee to the free exercise of religion at the highest level of protection.
-
The 7-2 decision threw out the challenge to the law, saying Texas and other objecting GOP-dominated states were not required to pay anything under the mandate provision and thus lacked standing.
-
The high court has agreed to consider a major rollback of abortion rights. The test case comes from Mississippi, where state law bans most abortions after 15 weeks.
