If you're a prosecutor, and you believe the defendant is guilty, you only talk about ultimate truth, but not intermediate truth. If you're the defense attorney, you care deeply about intermediate truth, but you tend to neglect ultimate truth.
No country in the history of the world has ever contributed more to humankind and accomplished more for its people in so brief a period of time as Israel has done since its relatively recent rebirth in 1948.
We don't have an Official Secrets Act in the United States, as other countries do. Under the First Amendment, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of association are more important than protecting secrets.
It is the wall of separation between church and state . . . that is largely responsible for religion thriving in this country, as compared to those European countries in which church and state have been united, resulting in opposition to the church by those who disapprove of the government.
I have made a career out of arguing that we shouldn't be criminalizing political differences. I've made a career out of arguing that the grand jury is an abusive institution. I have made a career out of arguing that we shouldn't stretch and expand the criminal law. I'm not going to change it because you think these are abnormal times. When Thomas Jefferson told the Justice Department that they had to prosecute Aaron Burr, and that he was going to have the chief justice impeached unless he found Aaron Burr guilty, those were special times too.
In my neighborhood, everyone had an opinion on the local cantor. You didn't go to a synagogue to listen to the rabbi's sermon. You went to listen to the cantor. It was like a concert.
To ask about the 'source' of rights or morals assumes an erreous conclusion. To ask about the source of morals is to assume that such a source exists. As if it existed outside of human constructed systems. The 'source' is the human ability to learn from experience and to entrench rights in our laws and in our consciousness. Our rights come from our long history of wrongs.
There will never be another Ed Koch. He was an original, but he represented a significant, if shrinking, segment of American Jewry who refused to compromise their liberal values, their support for Israel or their Jewish pride.
Doing something because God has said to do it does not make a person moral: it merely tells us that person is a prudential believer, akin to the person who obeys the command of an all-powerful secular king.
I've written important articles on prevention, on the concept of the preventive state, how the law is moving much more in an area of trying to prevent wrongs than trying to deal with them after they occur. That will be my academic/intellectual legacy.
When I was 14 or 15, a camp counselor told me I was smart. I had never been very good in school, but he told me once that I was smart but my mind operated a little differently.