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 is from Oklahoma, which like 45 other states, has laws that say charter schools must be public schools funded by the state, closely supervised by the state, and be non-sectarian. -
At issue is a case testing the reach of federal laws that promise special help for children with disabilities in public schools. Specifically: What do parents have to prove in order to get that specialized help? -
At the center of the case is the school system in Montgomery County, Md., the most religiously diverse county in the U.S., with 160,000 students of almost all faiths. -
At issue is whether school systems are required to allow parents to opt their kids out of classes because of religious objections to classroom materials. -
Every day it seems new conflicts arise between President Trump and the courts. Prompting another round of the question: Are we in a constitutional crisis? -
The Supreme Court said on Thursday it will hear arguments in May on whether the U.S. Constitution guarantees birthright citizenship, a case stemming from an executive order by President Trump.
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President Trump issued an executive order on day one of his administration that sought to limit birthright citizenship. That idea is widely considered a fringe view because the Supreme Court ruled to the contrary 127 years ago, and that decision has never been disturbed. -
The Supreme Court ordered the administration to "facilitate" the return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly taken to El Salvador and remains in custody there. -
The U.S. Supreme Court has said the administration is free to move forward with the firing of 16,000 probationary federal employees. But the decision wasn't a total victory for the administration, since the court made no ruling on whether the firings themselves were actually legal.
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The Supreme Court's stay, which allows the administration to execute the firings for now, while it litigates in federal court, does not mean the terminations were lawful.
