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 鈥� most recently RBG 鈥� 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 鈥� anchored by Totenberg 鈥� 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 鈥� 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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Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who is assigned to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, was the one who received the emergency application brought by a Wisconsin taxpayers group. -
The action dashes hopes of American Samoans who were seeking birthright citizenship and leaves intact a decision that breathed new life into distinctions between U.S. states and territories. -
At issue in Tuesday's case was Alabama's congressional redistricting plan, adopted by the Republican state legislature after the 2020 Census. -
The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency does not have the authority to mandate carbon emissions from existing power plants. -
The U.S. Supreme Court has overturned the constitutional right to an abortion, reversing Roe v. Wade, the court's five-decade-old decision that guaranteed a woman's right to obtain an abortion. -
Senators will vote Thursday on whether to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the high court. Her fate was never in doubt, but was cemented when three GOP senators said they would vote for her. -
The ruling came in the case of an elected trustee of the Houston Community College board who sued his fellow board members, charging that they violated his First Amendment right by censuring him -
If confirmed, she would be the first Black woman to serve on the nation's highest court, and she would be one of four women on the court, the largest number ever to serve at one time.
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In an interview published Monday, Ginni Thomas said that while she did attend the Jan. 6 rally to protest President Biden's election, she left before Donald Trump took the stage. -
President Biden announced Judge Jackson, 51, will be his nominee to the Supreme Court. If confirmed, she will be the first Black woman to serve on the high court.
