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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At Wednesday's argument, the justices struggled to reconcile their own previous decisions enforcing the nation's trademark laws and what some of them saw as a potential threat to free speech. -
The whiskey maker argues that the toy named Bad Spaniel infringes on its trademark, confuses consumers and tarnishes its reputation.
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The effort by the Project on Government Oversight and the Lawyers Defending American Democracy follows criticism aimed at the court for perceived ethical lapses and failures to deal with them.
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At the Supreme Court, some Republican-dominated states seemed on the verge of invalidating Biden's student loan forgiveness plan. A majority of the court's conservatives looked skeptical of the plan.
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The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday hears arguments over whether the Biden administration exceeded its authority with its student debt forgiveness program.
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At issue is how the CFPB is funded: It gets its money from the Federal Reserve, which in turn is funded by bank fees, and not through congressional appropriations.
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Day two of the big tech arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court: On one side are Twitter, Google, Facebook and other mega companies. On the other, American families of people killed in terrorist attacks.
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The Supreme Court heard arguments in a case involving Section 230, the law that provides tech companies a legal shield against being sued over content posted online by their users.
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At the center of two cases to be argued over two days is Section 230, which provides tech companies a legal shield over what users post online.
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The Supreme Court says it is unable so far to conclude who leaked the Dobbs decision last summer. This comes after an eight-month probe conducted by the court's marshal and an investigative team.
