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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Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey had argued that the rights of Missouri voters to hear from presidential candidates were being violated by the New York criminal proceeding. -
The decision likely ensures that the case against Trump won’t be tried before the election, and then only if he is not reelected. -
The court said that the challengers, a group called the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, had no right to be in court at all. It's a loss for the Missouri and Kansas attorneys general, who had both joined the lawsuit seeking to remove mifepristone nationwide. -
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are Missouri, Louisiana and five individuals who were either banned from social media during the pandemic or whose posts, they say, were not prominently featured. -
Missouri passed a law in 2021 that makes federal gun restrictions illegal in the state and bars officials from enforcing laws that would "infringe" upon the right to "bear arms." It also allows anyone to sue law enforcement who don't comply. -
The court unanimously dismissed on standing grounds a challenge to President Biden's groundbreaking plan to forgive some or all federal student loan debt for tens of millions of Americans. -
The decision reverses decades of precedent upheld over the years by narrow court majorities that included Republican-appointed justices. -
On Tuesday, the justices will hear expedited arguments in a challenge to the Biden plan brought by six states — Missouri, Nebraska, Iowa, Arkansas, Kansas and South Carolina. -
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. -
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.
