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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Although the Supreme Court didn't weigh in on the legality of the Trump administration's plans to shrink the federal workforce, it allowed the firings to go forward while lawsuits play out. That will likely play out in Kansas City, which is home to nearly 30,000 federal employees at multiple government agencies. -
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear two cases in the fall that test state laws banning transgender women and girls from participating in sports at publicly funded institutions. Both Missouri and Kansas have passed simii restrictions. -
At issue was whether school systems are required to provide parents with an "opt-out" option when parents claim their religious beliefs conflict with their children's course material. -
The decision issues some limits on the power of federal judges to universally block President Trump's executive order on birthright citizenship, asking lower courts to reconsider their rulings. -
Missouri is among several states that have tried to remove Planned Parenthood clinics from state Medicaid programs, even though Medicaid funds cannot generally be used to fund abortions. -
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.
