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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Writing for the 6-3 conservative majority, Justice Clarence Thomas said federal courts may not hear post-conviction evidence to show how deficient the trial or appellate lawyer in state court was. -
At issue was a federal law that has been on the books for 20 years that barred federal candidates from raising more than $250,000 to repay loans made to their campaigns.
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The unanimous decision was sufficiently narrow that other cities, indeed Boston itself, could construct rules that would limit flag flying to government-approved messages.
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The court is weighing whether the Biden administration must continue to enforce the Trump-era "Remain in Mexico" program, which keeps some asylum-seekers in Mexico while they await a U.S. hearing.
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The court's liberal wing has no desire to overturn the court's precedents, but its conservatives want to focus on accommodating religion in public schools and other public institutions.
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The case comes to the court in the midst of a sea change in the law relating to the relationship between government and religion.
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The 8-to-1 decision rested on prior decisions, but Justice Gorsuch, in a furious concurrence, called for reversing those precedents, which he said were based on "racial stereotypes."
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The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday made it easier to sue police and prosecutors for malicious prosecution. But the decision still leaves in place other barriers to such lawsuits.
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Legal ethics experts had previously said while Ginni Thomas is an outspoken conservative activist, her husband is able to act as an independent judge of matters that come before the court.
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Conservative activist Ginni Thomas, who's married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, sent a number of texts to then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows between November 2020 and January 2021.
