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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Same-sex marriage is now legal nationwide in the U.S. For a look at what lay behind the Supreme Court's decision, and its ramifications, David Greene speaks with NPR's Mara Liasson and Nina Totenberg.
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Thursday's court ruling upheld subsidies nationwide under the Affordable Care Act. And unlike the court's previous Obamacare ruling, the majority was unified and the tone was broad.
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On Thursday, the Supreme Court upheld the nationwide availability of tax subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. For details on the ruling, Renee Montagne speaks with Nina Totenberg and Mara Liasson.
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The Supreme Court on Monday ruled in favor of a group of California raisin growers who objected to being forced to participate in a crop set-aside program.
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The Supreme Court has made it much more difficult for governments at every level to regulate signs. And in a separate decision, the court gave states free rein over what may be put on license plates.
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The justices divided 5-to-4, concluding that a consular officer's citation of unspecified "terrorist activities" was enough to justify barring a spouse without further explanation.
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In a 6-3 decision, the high court sided with the White House over Congress on the thorny foreign policy issue.
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Samantha Elauf wore a headscarf to a job interview at an Abercrombie & Fitch store and was denied a position because of it. On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that that was clearly wrong.
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Justice Sonia Sotomayor and lawyers arguing in favor of Oklahoma's lethal-injection cocktail got into a clash so pronounced that Chief Justice John Roberts chastised Sotomayor for talking too much.
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On Tuesday, the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court sparred, skewered and probed the legal arguments on gay marriage. But at the end of a tumultuous day, there still was no certainty about the outcome.
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Justice Kennedy, seen as the determinative vote in the same-sex-marriage cases before the Supreme Court, was very tough on gay-marriage advocates.
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The legal battle over same-sex marriage hits the Supreme Court next week. It's an extraordinarily high-stakes clash, but the men and women at the center of it see themselves as incredibly ordinary.