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.
- The Supreme Court has handed DOGE at least a temporary victory. The team can keep accessing information collected by the Social Security istration, including medical and mental health records.
The order, for now, overturns actions that limited DOGE's access to sensitive private information. In a separate case, the court said DOGE did not have to share internal records with a watchdog group.
The majority opinion in each case was written by one of the court's liberals, proving that liberals too can rule for religion, for gun manufacturers, and for a woman claiming she was discriminated against on the job for being straight.- The Supreme Court handed President Trump a temporary win, permitting the istration to prematurely end a humanitarian program that had granted two-year legal status to half a million people.
The move to grant a stay in the case means that the Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who were granted temporary parole under the program known as CHNV would lose their temporary legal status to be in the U.S.
The decision makes it easier to win approval for highways, bridges, pipelines, wind farms, and other infrastructure projects.- A deadlocked U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday effectively blocked the creation of the nation's first religious charter school in Oklahoma.
At issue is President Trump's firing of NLRB member Gwen Wilcox, who still has three years left on her term, and Cathy Harris, who still has four years left on her term as a member of the MSPB.
The court was deadlocked 4-4, which meant a state Supreme Court ruling that declared the school violated the constitutional separation of church and state remained in place.- The U.S. Supreme Court seemed at least partially divided as the justices heard arguments debating how the lower courts should handle President Trump's executive order on birthright citizenship.