Start with the obvious, as NPR’s legal affairs correspondent did Thursday night, Feb.��7, before an audience of more than 500 people��in Corbett Family Hall’s seventh-floor ballroom. Though it still hasn’t reached parity, journalism’s gender landscape is evening out. Totenberg is far from the only woman in the newsroom — and she no longer writes her stories while sitting next to rookie male reporters making 50 percent more money than she does.

Over those five decades, Totenberg has reported on the nominations of three chief justices and 16 associate justices — and the unsuccessful nominations of several others — while becoming the nation’s foremost journalistic interpreter of the Supreme Court. Of the shifts she’s witnessed, those of greatest interest to her audience happened inside the court and in the law itself.

Her candid conversation with Notre Dame law professor and constitutional scholar , sponsored by the Law 91��Ƶ, traced several. The Supreme Court’s caseload has been cut in half, down from about 160 cases per term in the early 1970s to more like 75 or 80 today. Diversity of experience is no longer a priority for nominations — where the Warren court featured former politicians of wide-ranging achievements, Totenberg said that all the current justices save Elena Kagan were plucked straight from the federal appeals courts.

NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg, left, speaks with Notre Dame Law Professor and Associate Dean Randy Kozel on Feb.��7 at the Downes Club Ballroom in Corbett Family Hall. Photos by Barbara Johnston/University of Notre Dame.

It is no secret that the justices’ religious backgrounds have moved from mainline Protestant to mostly Jewish and Catholic. And, Totenberg said, given the success of the “Federalist Society revolution,” the failures of presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to tackle judicial nominations early in their terms, and the replacements of the Republican-appointed centrists Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy with current justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh, the court’s ideological makeup itself has grown decidedly more conservative. “It will result in a very different court for generations to come,” she noted.

One far subtler change, the inclusion of a synopsis at the top of each court opinion, has made Totenberg’s job much easier — and her listeners’ understanding of newsworthy rulings more sophisticated, or at least more accurate. “We all made mistakes,” she said of those earlier days.

Synopsis or no synopsis, she told Kozel, nothing substitutes for being present when an opinion is handed down. “Because we live in the digital age, somebody back at NPR is looking at the synopsis while I’m in the courtroom,” she explained, turning to the 2012 Obamacare ruling for an example. “Being in the courtroom saved me from making the mistake … that a significant number of my colleagues made,” she said. Namely, reporting that the court had struck down the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate to purchase health insurance, when in fact the court upheld that provision.

More than 500 people attended “A Conversation with NPR’s Nina Totenberg” on Feb.��7 at the Downes Club Ballroom in Corbett Family Hall. Notre Dame Law 91��Ƶ sponsored the event.

Asked to compare the four chief justices of her tenure, the 75-year-old Totenberg said that Warren and William Rehnquist, the latter of whom served from 1986 to 2005, were the most successful so far, and the most fair. Warren was “a politician in the best sense of the word,” she said, a man whose commitment to consensus and inclusion best explains to her the unanimity of his court’s landmark 1954 school desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. While Warren was often criticized for not being a constitutional “theoretician,” his essential dictum was, “But is it fair?” — a standard that matters more by far to ordinary people, Totenberg said, and which led to fundamental improvements in due process that we take for granted today.

For his part, Rehnquist had “a wicked sense of humor,” Totenberg recalls. More importantly, he led the court with a Warren-like devotion to its traditions and culture, to fairness and mutual respect in its deliberations, a quality that produced a more unified vision along the bench, even in some higher-profile cases.

It’s not that the court today doesn’t reach 9-0 or 8-1 decisions, “but for the most part … those are the cases you don’t really care about,” she said, smiling. “And I don’t really write about them.”

Could she think of anyone who had the makings of an excellent chief justice but never got the chance? “Merrick Garland,” Totenberg replied to some applause.

“He’s not all that liberal in a lot of ways,” she said of Obama’s 2016 nominee for associate justice, who never received a hearing in the Republican-led Senate. “The saddest thing about the failed Garland nomination is that, even if you love the nominations of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, you can’t look back at that 10 months and say that it was fair. It wasn’t fair. It had never been done before. Not for that length of time. And it will be done again.

“We will all pay the consequences for it. And the court will pay the consequences for it.”

The New York City native is one of three daughters of famed concert violinist Roman Totenberg, the story of whose she told the audience with some emotion. She said she always knew she wanted to be a reporter. Writing for a Boston newspaper in her 20s she covered everything — the police beat, the courts, education policy, “whatever.” She learned her way around Capitol Hill as Roll Call’s only staffer, then added the nation’s highest court to her beat when she took a job at the weekly National Observer.

She started by calling up each of the associate justices to ask if she could drop by to meet them. To her surprise, most of them gave her anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour, and she simply asked each one how he did his job. Their answers were an education in themselves.

Joining NPR in 1975, Totenberg had already established her reputation as a reporter who got stories others couldn’t, but for years she still had to cover the Justice Department, the rest of the federal judiciary, both congressional judiciary committees and the intelligence community — terrain she said NPR now patrols through 10 full-time correspondents. “You were my first law professor,” third-year law student Jake Crammer told her during the question-and-answer period.

Newsweek may have once called Nina Totenberg the “crème de la crème” of NPR News. But at Notre Dame Law 91��Ƶ, “you were my first law professor” is an even higher compliment.

John Nagy ’00 M.A. is managing editor of��.

Originally published by John Nagy at on ����.��8.

��

Well, back in those hazy hardscrabble mythological early years of the University of Notre Dame du Lac, the Brothers of Holy Cross made bricks. A little more mundane than bourbon fudge, yes, but in the thaw of 1843, when Father Edward Sorin and company made their first passes around the lakes and contemplated the muck they’d scrape from their boots, the God-given qualities of the earth around them were precisely the point. Once described as a “white, putty-like substance,” the muck of St. Mary’s Lake was marl, a form of loose clay rich in calcium carbonate that someone — the histories credit Sorin, but the histories credit him with pretty much everything — recognized as ideal for making both bricks and the lime for the mortar that would hold them together. The soil along the lakeshore was providentially thick with it. Really, it’s hard to imagine a better unexpected find for an impoverished troupe of hustling university builders.

The new Badin Hall chapel’s old building material. Photo by Barbara Johnston.

��

It’s also hard to imagine a single ingredient more determinative of Notre Dame’s unique beauty. Over the next 30 years or so, the brothers and their teams of hired workmen who lived in shanties along the shore of St. Mary’s Lake produced millions of units of a distinctive yellow-buff construction material known as “Notre Dame brick,” excavating the marl from the lakes and the creek that drained them into the St. Joseph River by hand, pick and shovel. They’d slop it into simple wooden forms, leave it to dry and then kiln it for days at temperatures that reached 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. With it they built Sacred Heart Church and the Presbytery, Brownson, Washington, Science (now LaFortune), Sorin, Crowley, Corby, Badin and Riley halls, a respectable share of the Dome and a brickpile of buildings that no longer exist, and whenever the University tore one down or accidentally burnt it to the ground, they’d salvage what they could and reuse it. Like that one time after the Main Building fire.

��

The work was punishing and messy and the business difficult to manage. Father Basil Moreau railed against it during his visit from France as Superior General in 1857, but how does one forbid work that, as a centennial history puts it, “at times” made “the difference between eating and not eating”? Sorin himself wrote in 1860 that lime and brick making at the school were “a surer source of existence than the number of its pupils.”

��

As the University grew, so did the little trading-post town about two miles away, a ready market for the surplus brick that was fortified by the university’s orderly French comeliness. South Benders bought Notre Dame brick to build their homes, schools, sidewalks, factories and breweries. In time, the brothers leased out the business to John McCabe, a graduate of Notre Dame’s Manual Labor 91��Ƶ, and another local man, striking a deal to buy back their product as needed on a modest discount at $6 per thousand. When the time finally came to seal up the marl pits for good in 1899, there was enough brick left over for the school to keep building with it for another two decades.

��

People love Notre Dame brick. When workers tore the Fieldhouse down in 1983 and deposited the brick in White Field, the stocks mostly vanished before school officials knew what to do with it. Apart from its distinctive color that expresses the high manganese content in the marl, the brothers’ brick is smooth, soft and so porous that water sprayed on a wall of it will often be absorbed before it can drip to the ground. Bricklaying requires a watered-down mortar so pressure from the load won’t crack straight through the block. Smack two of them together, they thud.

��

Modern factory-made brick, scientifically formulated and fired at temperatures twice as high as what the brothers achieved, isn’t any of that. They “ting!” more like glass when banged together and are twice as strong to boot. Further, biological growth turns ND’s antique variety a “very unique shade of black,” says Tony Polotto, who, as the project manager in the University architect’s office responsible for every square inch of the campus’ “exterior envelope” — the roofs, doors, windows and outer walls that form the backdrop of so much of Notre Dame life — is the de facto keeper of it.

��

Two years ago, having used up the last of the 10,000 Notre Dame bricks salvaged from the deconstruction of the Earth Sciences Building while completing restoration projects around Main Quad, Polotto got a call from the salvage company taking apart the old Wilson Brothers Shirt Co. factory on the city’s south side. Polotto could see this was the stuff, and a petrographic analysis confirmed it. So he bought 30,000 bricks, enough when properly locked away and protected from the weather to last him decades. “That was for me being a hoarder,” he says. “I wanted it for our attic stock.”

��

Word got around. And when that portion of South Bend’s landmark Drewry’s Brewery that Christoph Muessel had built with Notre Dame brick in 1865 came down in February this year, Polotto got another phone call. His attic full, he turned this offer down. Two weeks later, he got the order to prepare for the restoration of Badin Hall that would begin in August. A donor wanted to build a new chapel on to the dormitory built in 1897 and the exterior face wall would require Notre Dame brick to match. Rather than deplete his new stocks, Polotto went to market, buying 30,000 of the Drewry’s brick to cover the entire project. Providence again.

��

The price has gone up since the deal Notre Dame cut in 1868 to something like $3 per salvaged brick, but when the Badin Bullfrogs reconvene for Mass in the fall of 2018, there’ll be a monk-like beer in those bricks along with the old familiar blood.

��

It’s not the best stuff to build with these days, Polotto admits. Except that, at Notre Dame, it is. “This is more than a labor of love,” he explains. “It’s maintaining what we have.”

John Nagy is an associate editor of this magazine.

��

Originally published by John Nagy ’00M.A. at on October 02, 2017.

After 10 years of planning, the Murdy Family Organ has reached its permanent home inside the Basilica of the Sacred Heart.

Read more: .