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 court's most conservative members upheld the Texas law, but almost as important as the result was how the court reached its decision — without full briefing and arguments before any court. -
The court ruled that NCAA rules are not reasonably necessary to distinguish between college and professional sports. Still, the ruling could be potentially transformative.
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The 7-2 decision threw out the challenge to the law, on grounds that Texas and other objecting GOP-dominated states were not required to pay anything under the mandate provision.
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The death row inmate, who had brain surgery, claims that death by lethal injection would cause severe and painful seizures. The court refused to hear his plea over dissent from the liberal justices.
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The state law bans most abortions after 15 weeks. The lower courts blocked its enforcement, finding it in conflict with Roe v. Wade and subsequent abortion decisions.
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The state banned all elective medical procedures, including abortions, amid the outbreak. Abortion-rights activists say Texas is "exploiting this crisis to ... ban abortion in the U.S."
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In a separate decision the court said police may make traffic stops in the assumption that the driver is the owner.
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But other cases may have to be decided sooner, among them those involving subpoenas for Donald Trump's financial records, and cases involving the Electoral College.
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Supreme Court justices make a big effort to visit public universities. State public records shine a light on these visits, and what they cost the public.
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A videographer spent two decades documenting the salvage of the Queen Anne's Revenge, and when North Carolina put his work online without permission, he sued.
