JEFFREY TOOBIN

I'm a big fan of good grades. But I am going to suggest to you that you will find that the skills of a student are of somewhat less use to you once you get out into what is sometimes referred to as 'the real world.'

Everyone wants to be paid well - I know that I certainly do. But there are lots of other satisfactions that we get from our work. To feel needed. To feel accomplishment. To believe that our work matters. Being a lawyer gives you a rare chance to experience that kind of success.

The assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy led directly to the passage of a historic law, the Gun Control Act of 1968.

My own career reflects a strange dichotomy between the world we've long known and the world that will become.

Students follow rules. Students complete assignments. The job of students - in part, at least - is to please their teachers. Now, I realize I may be exaggerating a little here, but basically I think I'm right: students do what they're told.

The United States, like any great power, is always going to have an intelligence operation, and some electronic surveillance is obligatory in the modern world.

Conspiracy theories are beliefs unencumbered by facts.

Courtney Vance and I are college classmates, weirdly enough. We're both Harvard class of 1982. Courtney, as a work-study job, was a typesetter at the Harvard 'Crimson,' the newspaper where I worked.

The role of the defense is to be an advocate for their client, regardless of whether he did it or not, within the bounds of the law.

I grew up, like most people in my generation, watching John Travolta. I was thrilled to meet him.

One of the main things I know about O.J. Simpson is that he is a compulsive talker. So if I were to ask him one question, I would get 45 minutes on the history of the case. It would be irrelevant what I would ask him - he would just start talking.

Rodney King is a progenitor of all these cell phone videos that we have. It was unusual that a person had a video camera to take a picture of the Rodney King beating. Now, of course, everybody has a phone, and that has been one of the key factors in all the new attention to the issue.

Cameras in the courtroom is a great idea.

There is always sleaze in the news. And you know what? The news is always a combination of things that are interesting and things that are important.

I think trials are inherently dramatic and interesting and are always going to be part of the news.

The transformation of the D.C. Circuit has been replicated in federal courts around the country. Obama has had two hundred and eighty judges confirmed, which represents about a third of the federal judiciary.

We have never had a president of the United States or a nominee of a major party who was a Supreme Court law clerk.

When Obama took office, Republican appointees controlled ten of the thirteen circuit courts of appeals; Democratic appointees now constitute a majority in nine circuits. Because federal judges have life tenure, nearly all of Obama's judges will continue serving well after he leaves office.

For a long time, the Court has moved toward outlawing all forms of racial preference, including affirmative action, and Obama seems accepting, even supportive, of the change.

Obviously, a big part of the American Revolution was there would be no Church of England the way there was in England. There was a specific attempt not to have an established church.

For someone who has been so important to my career, I have had absolutely no interaction with O.J. Simpson one-on-one in my whole life. I've tried many times. I have written him in prison, I've had other contact ... but he never responded, so I have never had a conversation with O.J. Simpson, never met the guy.

Beyond diversity, the story of Obama's influence on the courts is more complex. Indeed, it could serve as a metaphor for his Presidency: symbolically rich but substantively hazy. Obama took office after years of intense conservative focus on the courts.

Judges can receive gifts as long as they report them.

Even in Madison’s day, the practice of gerrymandering for partisan advantage was familiar. In the late seventeen-eighties, there were claims that Patrick Henry had tried to gerrymander Madison himself out of the First Congress. The term was coined during Madison’s Presidency, to mock Elbridge Gerry, the governor of Massachusetts, who in 1811 approved an election district that was said to look like a salamander.

There were times when David Souter thought of Bush v. Gore and wept.