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 Supreme Court upheld the right of children born on U.S. soil to automatic American citizenship. In so doing, the court rejected President Trump's most aggressive attempt to limit immigration.
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All Things Considered host Scott Detrow speaks with NPR's editor-in-chief Thomas Evans and Nina Totenberg about her reporting on the final day of the Supreme Court term.
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NPR's Steve Inskeep and Michel Martin discuss the final decisions of the Supreme Court's term with justice correspondents Carrie Johnson and Nina Totenberg and political correspondent Mara Liasson.
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The decision firmly rejected the executive order that Trump issued on the first day of his second term. -
At issue in the case was a post-Watergate law that Congress passed to limit the amount of money individuals can give to political parties. -
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who has long coached his daughters' and other girls' basketball teams at school, wrote the court's majority opinion. -
The Supreme Court struck down most of the limits that Congress and the courts had previously established to protect the independence of regulatory agencies that comprise much of the federal government. -
In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court struck down a 91-year-old precedent that has prevented presidents from removing members of independent agencies meant to be a check on his power. -
During Supreme Court opinions Thursday, Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion in an asylum case, appeared to rebut Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who wrote the dissent. The move was highly unusual — and on Friday there was a coda. -
The Supreme Court gave the Trump administration the go-ahead to begin mass deportations of hundreds of thousands of Haitians who have been living and working legally in the U.S. for years.
