You wouldn't go to a hospital, you wouldn't go to a law firm where the doctors and lawyers were not retained on merit: where they all had tenure regardless of competence. Parents feel the same way about schools that they send their children to.
While I agree completely that attracting good teachers is difficult, and we need to spend more time doing that - in part by paying them more money - I don't think there's any evidence for the idea that somehow tenure attracts good teachers. In fact, I think the evidence is to the contrary.
We're now segregating our schools based on economics; we're segregating our schools based on where a child's parents live. And it has the same corrosive effect of destroying people's opportunity as racial segregation did.
We must bring the rule of law to its full fruition in the United States, and when we do, we will have achieved the goals and rhetoric of our Founding Fathers.
Unlike people of my generation, my children and my grandchildren have grown up living with, knowing, people who were outwardly gay and lesbian. And they have learned that they're just like us... And when you see that they're just like us, the rationale for discrimination melts away.
One of the things that the court held in Brown v. Board of Education is that government can't impose a badge of inferiority on some of its citizens. Yet that is exactly what Proposition 8 does with respect to gay and lesbian couples in California.
It's terribly important that we extend the promise of equality that the Supreme Court and that the district court articulated in the DOMA case and in the Perry case to all Americans in all 50 states.
It is easy to be accurate if you have the freedom to be complicated, and it is very easy to be simple if you have the freedom to shade the truth. What's hard is to be simple and very accurate, and that takes work to figure out what are the simple truths that are going to sustain your case.
In any profession, whether it's teachers or doctors or lawyers, the more we say we're not going to evaluate those people on the merits, I think that's when the profession goes into decline.
I don't really believe in moral victories. You can have them when you're dealing with public opinion, but in litigation, you want to win the case. I want to win.
A trial is a powerful vehicle to explain things. It is the most time that anybody spends really thinking about one thing. Unless you are the analyst on the National Security staff that's assigned to monitor Putin, and that's all you do, day in and day out, very few people ever spend the time on a single subject that is spent during trial.
I made a penny for each paper delivered every day, plus 2 cents for Sunday papers. I had 120 customers. For a 10-year-old kid in the 1940s, that was a lot of money.
