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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On Monday, the Supreme Court heard arguments on whether to allow Texas to refuse a personalized license plate design featuring the Confederate flag.
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No telling yet which side will win. But did Justice Kennedy's mixed signals Wednesday hint that he was leaning toward the administration's view of federal subsidies for health insurance?
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Arizona voters approved a bipartisan commission to draw lines between congressional districts. Now the Supreme Court has been asked to put the legislators back in charge.
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Did Abercrombie & Fitch violate a prohibition against religious discrimination by not hiring a woman who wears a hijab? The company contends it just has a neutral policy against wearing caps.
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On one side of the case is the retailer Abercrombie & Fitch, and on the other, a 17-year-old job applicant who was highly rated for hiring but then rejected because she wore a Muslim headscarf.
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Robert MacLean gave a reporter information about U.S. air marshals being taken off flights to save money.
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The court today heard arguments testing whether states may prohibit candidates for judgeships from soliciting campaign donations personally.
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Health care experts say an adverse ruling would be catastrophic for the health insurance program that the president has fought so hard to enact and preserve.
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A federal appeals court in Ohio has decided that four states may ban gay marriage if they wish, splitting from the decision reached by other federal appeals courts in similar cases.
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On Monday, on the first day of its new term, the court stunned the legal world, refusing to take any of the appeals pending on lower court rulings allowing gay marriage.
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The Supreme Court has stayed a Virginia court's ruling which ended the state's ban on same-sex marriages.
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The court ruled Monday in a case asking whether family-owned businesses that offer employees health insurance must include contraception in their plans if they object to some forms of it.