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 case tests the statute used to prosecute hundreds of defendants charged with invading the Capitol to stop the counting of electoral ballots for president in 2020. -
The law makes it a felony for doctors to medically treat gender dysphoria in minors. It will now go into effect except in the case of two anonymous plaintiffs who may continue to receive treatment. -
The Supreme Court heard arguments today in a case in which anti-abortion doctors are challenging the FDA's regulatory actions making abortion pills more accessible.
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At issue in the case is more than abortion rights. It's the entire structure of the FDA's regulatory power to approve drugs and continually evaluate their safety. -
At issue is the FDA's regulatory power to approve drugs and continually evaluate their safety — a system that until now has been widely viewed as the gold standard for both safety and innovation -
At issue was a sweeping Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision that barred government officials from having contacts with social media platforms. -
In a major First Amendment case, the Supreme Court heard arguments on the federal government's ability to combat what it sees as false, misleading or dangerous information online.
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The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are Missouri, Louisiana and five individuals who were either banned from social media during the pandemic or whose posts, they say, were not prominently featured. -
The court laid down guidelines for the lower courts to use in assessing the facts in similar cases. -
The Supreme Court ruled that public officials may block people on social media in certain circumstances. The rulings were unanimous.
