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 Supreme Court appeared to lean toward reinstating the death sentence imposed on the Boston Marathon bomber. The liberal justices were incredulous at the actions of the judge in the original trial.
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The federal government is appealing a lower court ruling that overturned Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's death sentence. -
Both liberal and conservative Supreme Court justices pressed the U.S. government's lawyer about why a detainee at Guantanamo Bay couldn't testify about his own torture at the hands of the CIA.
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The case's central issue concerns whether a Guantánamo Bay detainee who has never been charged with a crime can subpoena testimony from the CIA contractors who supervised his torture.
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Monday was the first day of the Supreme Court's new term. It was the first time in more than a year that almost all the justices were at the court.
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If some of the justices greet the new term with great anticipation for a new conservative legal era, others likely are facing the term with dread.
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The U.S. Supreme Court starts a new term Monday with a menu of high-profile cases, from abortion to gun rights and religious rights.
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President Biden's nominee for the solicitor general, who presents the government's position in the Supreme Court, is Elizabeth Prelogar. She's served in the job on an acting basis since January 2021.
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"If the Democrats can do it, the Republicans can do it," Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer told NPR's Nina Totenberg.
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But the justice was philosophical about the outcome: "I wrote a dissent — and that's the way it works," he said. The decision was part of what court watchers call the "shadow docket."
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The Supreme Court's most conservative members upheld a Texas law banning abortions after about six weeks. But the court reached its decision without full briefing and arguments before any court.
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The law bans abortions after cardiac activity is detected, usually about six weeks into pregnancy and well before many people even know they are pregnant. The ruling is at odds with court precedents.
