I never place limits on the potential success of my students. If they're going into acting, they're going to win the Oscar... If they're going into law, they're going to be chief justice.
I'd require that every university, public or private, be governed by the constitutional standards regarding freedom of expression and due process. There is no reason for treating adult college students any differently in the university setting than in the outside world.
The Israeli military plays more than a critical role in defending the citizens of the Jewish state. It also plays an important social, scientific and psychological role in preparing its young citizens for the challenging task of being Israelis in a difficult world.
Yes, believers and non-believers and skeptics can all live together and get along. But there cannot be an imperialistic imposition of religion by the state or by the church. All people must be equal--believers, skeptics, disbelievers, atheists, and those who chose religion. Unless we are all deemed equal, and unless the morality of disbelief is deemed the equivalent of the morality of belief, we will simply be tolerated, and that is not the American way.
I don't think the law exists to arrive at the truth. If it did, we wouldn't have exclusionary rules, we wouldn't have presumptions of innocence, we wouldn't have proof beyond reasonable doubt. There's an enormous difference between the role of truth in law and the role of truth in science. In law, truth is one among many goals.
I love discomfort. I mean, my whole life is discomfort. One reason I can never retire is that the idea of just sitting on the beach totally comfortable is not a desideratum in my life. I like ambiguity, I like conflict, I like uncertainly.
I tell my students, if you ever become comfortable with your role as criminal defense lawyer, it's time to quit. It should be a constant source of discomfort, because you're dealing with incredible moral ambiguity, and you've been cast into a role which is not enviable.
I fear that the impact of university censorship and university denial of due process will be to mis-educate a generation of students away from core values of civil liberties and constitutional safeguards. Students who have been led to believe by university administrators and faculty that censorship and denial of due process are acceptable norms will be more susceptible to accepting those norms in their post-university lives. That would be a tragedy for America.
In today's distorted world of 'human rights,' truth takes a back seat to ideology, and false claims - especially those that 'support' radical ideologies - persist even after they have been exposed.
We have to fulfill what the real meaning of the Second Amendment is: reasonable access to guns for self-protection and for hunting. And there's no room in America for these semiautomatic, automatic and other kinds of weapons that are simply designed to cause mass havoc.
What the United States has to do is send a clear message to Iran that they will not be able to develop nuclear weapons. Why endure the difficulty of sanctions if they are not going to be able to develop nuclear weapons anyway?
I read in the newspaper that the Catholic Church finally decided that it had been theologically improper to try to convert the Jews. Whoops! Sorry for all those inquisitions, crusades, and autos-da-fe. Previous popes were wrong - infallible, perhaps, but wrong.
I am attacked equally by the hard right and the hard left for expressing what they regard as politically incorrect views. I thrive on such controversy and welcome it. It only encourages me to speak out more. I have not been affected by attacks on me for defending freedom of speech and due process.