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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Both liberal and conservative lawyers have judge-shopped, but in recent years, some conservative-leaning groups have been laser focused on bringing their challenges in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. -
The court left in place a 90-year old landmark decision that declared that presidents cannot fire members of a multi-member independent agency, except in cases of bad behavior. -
At issue is whether the state court wrongly refused to accept the attorney general’s findings that a death row inmate is entitled to a new trial. -
Richard Glossip has had nine execution dates set over the years. He's eaten his last meal three times. He was tried twice and has had multiple appeals, including one at the Supreme Court. -
The ATF classifies the kits as firearms under the 1968 Gun Control Act, but kit manufacturers and sellers challenged the rule in court, asserting that the ATF had exceeded its authority. -
The government contends that ghost guns kits count as a firearm under a 1968 law. But those challenging the rule contend “a kit of parts is not a weapon.” -
The justices also left in place a Michigan state constitutional amendment that barred the use of public funds for private schools. -
For the most part, the justices still try to portray the court as amicable, but you don’t have to be a genius to see that they are not exactly happy campers. -
The justices, in a break from the way they have handled most such cases in the recent past, told the challengers to first litigate their claims in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. -
In New York major party candidates automatically appear on the ballot, but minor party candidates must collect 45,000 voter signatures by petition in order to qualify. Kennedy, who has withdrawn from the race and backed Donald Trump, gathered more than 100,000 valid signatures.
