Obviously I’m a lawyer; I like to have cases.
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.
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.
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.
Once I take a case, I’m stuck with it.
But I’d say my best boss was Tom Barr, who was a partner at Cravath, Swain & Moore in the 1960s. It’s because I learned so much from him.
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.
We’re lawyers. We present the arguments, and the court sorts out the merits.
Embrace a diversity of ideas. Embrace the fact that you can disagree with people and not be disagreeable. Embrace the fact that you can find common ground – if you disagree on nine out of 10 things, but can find common ground on that 10th, maybe you can make progress. If you can find common ground, you can accomplish great things.
I win virtually every case I should win, and I win a number of cases that people think I shouldn’t.
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.
Napster’s only alleged liability is for contributory or vicarious infringement. So when Napster’s users engage in noncommercial sharing of music, is that activity copyright infringement? No.
It’s a matter of priorities. Do you want to win, or would you like to sleep? Do you want to win, or would you like to take a day off?
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.
Here you have a new technology, and if that technology is going to work, you must allow people to provide central indexes of the data. It’s just like a newspaper that publishes classified ads.
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.