Honorary Degree Citation
Doctor of Laws
Nina Totenberg
Nina Totenberg, you are legal affairs correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR) and a
regular panelist on the weekly, syndicated public affairs television program, "Inside
Washington.” You are one of this country’s most distinguished journalists, and have performed
the great public service of helping millions of us better understand the law, one of the great
mechanisms for an orderly society. More than that, by making the law less mysterious and
more transparent, you have made it more accountable.
You pursued print journalism in newspapers and magazines before you literally found your
voice in radio, joining NPR in 1975.
In the intervening 34 years you have reported many stories that have drawn national
attention. You broke the story of Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment by Judge
Clarence Thomas, then a nominee for, and now a justice of, the U.S. Supreme Court. That
coverage caused the Senate Judiciary Committee to reopen the confirmation hearings and
resulted in NPR receiving the George Foster Peabody Award for its coverage of the hearings,
which you anchored.
The magnitude of the honors you have earned for your reporting is impressive because they
have been awarded by exacting judges. The National Press Foundation had never before
recognized a radio journalist with the award it gave you in 1988, the Sol Taishoff Award for
broadcaster of the year. The lawyers of the American Judicature Society honored you with its
first-ever award for an exemplary career body of work in the field of journalism and the law.
The American Bar Association has honored you no fewer than seven times for continued
excellence in legal reporting. You won the award that has been called the Pulitzer Prize of
broadcasting, the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton for your coverage of
Supreme Court nominations. And you are adding to that work daily.
Perhaps most important, your clear, concise, detailed broadcasts for NPR continue to make
complex Supreme Court rulings accessible and understandable to the public. We, who
understand how much the judiciary’s authoritativeness rests upon public perception, are
particularly proud to acknowledge your singular contribution in this critical area.
Not content with broadcasting alone, you have published articles in media like The New York
Times Magazine and The Christian Science Monitor. In one of the three articles you have
written for The Harvard Law Review (complete with 93 footnotes), you said of the Senators
who conducted the Clarence Thomas hearings: They asked "probing, but for the most part,
respectful and proper questions, and they knew enough to follow up and find out what the
nominee really meant in his answers.”
You are, in a word, judicious.