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 justices have agreed to hear only the claim that Tennessee’s law denies trans minors the equal protection of the law. -
The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the federal law making it a crime for anyone subject to a domestic violence court order to possess a gun.
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The decision was the first major gun ruling since 2022, when the high court broke sharply with the way gun laws had previously been handled by the courts. -
The Supreme Court ruled against a couple who challenged the constitutionality of a Trump-era tax provision, handing the government a victory in a case that had huge potential consequences.
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The case had potentially trillions of dollars in tax consequences for the federal budget, and the court's decision could have severely limited congressional options in enacting tax policy. -
The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on bump stocks Friday, declaring that the ATF exceeded its authority when it banned the devices.
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The Supreme Court has struck down the federal ban on bump stocks, declaring that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives exceeded its authority when it banned the devices. -
By a unanimous vote, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the FDA’s rules for prescribing and dispensing abortion pills.
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The decision was a loss for part-time Democratic activist Steve Elster, who contended that the living-person exception to the trademark law violated his right of free speech. -
The court said that the challengers, a group called the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, had no right to be in court at all since neither the organization nor its members could show they had suffered any concrete injury.
