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 U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that state constitutions can protect voting rights in federal elections and state courts can enforce those provisions.
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The court rules that state constitutions can protect voting rights in federal elections and state courts can enforce those provisions, a key opinion that should safeguard 2024 election integrity. -
The Supreme Court handed the Biden administration a major victory in a long-running immigration law dispute about guidelines for whom immigration authorities can target for arrest and deportation.
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Justice Samuel Alito says he didn't have to disclose a 2008 luxury trip to Alaska, or the flight on a private jet of hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer who had several cases before the high court.
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Justice Samuel Alito did not disclose a luxury trip he took with billionaire Paul Singer nor did he recuse himself from cases the businessman later had in front of the Supreme Court, a report alleges.
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The court rejects all of the challenges to the Indian Child Welfare Act, "some on the merits and others for lack of standing," Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in her majority opinion.
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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. -
On Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped back from the brink of totally gutting the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, reaffirmed the precedent interpreting how legislative districts must be drawn.
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Jack Daniel's, the famous Tennessee whiskey company, tried to stop production and marketing of a dog toy shaped and decorated like a Jack Daniel's bottle but with the name "Bad Spaniels" on the label. -
The Supreme Court has ruled against Alabama's defense of an electoral map drawn by the state's Republican-dominated legislature. Black voters had challenged the law as racially discriminatory.
