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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Teenagers in Washington, D.C., were inspired by a recent lesson in the First Amendment rights of students after three federal judges and their law clerks re-enacted a landmark Supreme Court case. -
The Trump administration and the GOP-controlled Senate have been confirming judicial nominations at a record pace but the breakneck speed and nontraditional vetting has come at a cost recently.
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The justices' decision could have huge implications for all retailers and service providers. And it will very likely come down to Justice Anthony Kennedy.
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Cash-starved states may prevail in nullifying a 1992 federal law prohibiting sports betting after Monday's arguments. -
A baker says being forced by Colorado law to make wedding cakes for same-sex couples would violate his First Amendment rights. The couple says the baker can't discriminate against them.
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In politics it's usually conservatives who attack liberals for being soft on crime. Those roles seemed at least partially reversed today at the Supreme Court, where justices heard an important case examining whether police need a search warrant to get cell phone site location information from wireless carriers.
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Can Police Track You Through Your Cellphone Without A Warrant?The Supreme Court wrestles again with interpreting the rules of the digital era and whether police need to get a search warrant to obtain cellphone location information. -
At the Supreme Court on Monday, the Justices heard arguments in a patent case about whether a federal agency review process impermissibly wields judicial power. The system, created by Congress in 2011 as part of the America Invents Act, determines if a patent has been correctly granted if there is a dispute.
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Harvard At 200: Justices Look Back On Their Law School Days — And BeyondOne out of six U.S. Supreme Court justices attended Harvard Law. As the school celebrates its 200th anniversary, six of those justices attended a panel where they remembered their time as students.
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Supreme Court justices this week looked at whether police can arrest people who they mistakenly believe are trespassing.
