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 Supreme Court heard arguments in a case involving Section 230, the law that provides tech companies a legal shield against being sued over content posted online by their users.
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At issue in the case is a 1996 law that shields internet platforms from being sued for material that appears on their sites. -
At the center of two cases to be argued over two days is Section 230, which provides tech companies a legal shield over what users post online. -
The court marshal clarified Friday that she spoke with the Supreme Court justices about the draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade for her recent report. The justices were not asked to sign affidavits. -
The Supreme Court says it is unable so far to conclude who leaked the Dobbs decision last summer. This comes after an eight-month probe conducted by the court's marshal and an investigative team.
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The court called the leak "one of the worst breaches of trust in its history." The Marshal of the Supreme Court "has to date been unable to identify a person responsible," the court said Thursday. -
For decades, advocates knew that when their allotted time had expired, they were done. Not so anymore. -
If adopted the so-called independent state legislature theory would give state legislatures the power to put in place all manner of election laws and rules, without any review by the state courts. -
The Supreme Court considered whether to endorse the "independent state legislature" theory, which could strip state courts of the power to strike down election laws enacted by state legislatures.
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The "independent state legislature theory" could give state legislatures independent power to put in place all manner of election rules, without any available review by state courts.
