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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Justice Clarence Thomas' disclosure form had been eagerly awaited in the wake of news reports that he accepted luxury trips worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from GOP megadonor Harlan Crow. -
The cases involve allegations that major retail pharmacies knowingly overcharged Medicaid and Medicare by overstating what their "usual and customary prices" are. -
The high court ruled against truck drivers who walked off the job, leaving their trucks loaded with wet concrete, but it preserved the rights of workers to time their strikes for maximum effect. -
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.
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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. -
A relative rarity until the Trump administration, in just four years, his Trump Justice Department asked the court for emergency relief an astounding 41 times. -
The court unanimously sided with Twitter in a case brought by plaintiffs who said it aided and abetted terrorism. Based on its opinion, it sent a related case involving Google back to lower courts.
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The case was brought by plaintiffs who said the social media company aided and abetted terrorism. Based on its opinion, the Supreme Court sent a related case involving Google back to the lower courts. -
The case dates back to then-citizen Trump's 2013 agreement with the GSA to lease the Old Post Office Building in Washington for conversion into the Trump International Hotel. -
Democrats' avowed purpose was to get the Supreme Court to write a code of conduct for itself, or in the absence of that, for Congress to write one. The Republicans' avowed purpose was quite different.
