Courts & Supreme Court

We live in a country that talks about being the home of the brave and the land of the free, and we have the highest incarceration rate in the world.

Racial discrimination in elections in Texas is no mere historical artifact. To the contrary, Texas has been found in violation of the Voting Rights Act in every redistricting cycle from and after 1970.

¦Activism is like ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’…If a judge is called an activist, you know the person saying that doesn't like the decision.

The Court is making the preposterous assumption that the People of the United States somehow silently redefined marriage in 1868 when they ratified the 14th Amendment.

They say a prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, and this always seemed like hyperbole - until Friday night a Texas grand jury announced an indictment of governor Rick Perry.

I wasn’t given a fair trial or anything. It’s sad that this process can be abused and that the university can totally change somebody’s life, with very little evidence...In the real world, rape and sexual assault are crimes punishable by going to jail - and rightfully so. Why is [campus sexual assault] left up to schools?

Not only should we not get our moral compass from religion, as a matter of fact we don’t…if you actually look at the bible or the Koran, and get your moral compass from there, it’s horrible – stoning people to death, stoning people for breaking the Sabbath. Now, of course we don’t do that anymore, but the reason we don’t do it is that we pick out those verses of the bible that we like, and reject those verses we don’t like. What criteria do we use to pick out the good ones and reject the bad ones? Non-biblical criteria, non-religious criteria. The same criteria as guide any modern person in their moral compass that has nothing to do with religion.

The fact is, we’re not collecting everybody’s email, we’re not collecting everybody’s phone things, we’re not listening to that…NSA can only target the communications of a US person with a probable cause finding under specific court order. Today, we have less than 60 authorizations on specific persons to do that.

I don't think Edward Snowden deserves a death penalty or life in prison. I think that's inappropriate. I think that's why he fled, [because] that is what he faced.

There is one lesson from the past, in particular, that we cannot afford to ignore: You cannot make progress on gender equality or broader human development without safeguarding women’s reproductive health and rights.

If I had to take my family to court and convict them of being followers of Christ, I am not sure where I would find the evidence.

Prostitution thrives in the United States. We focus in this country on punishing the girls. For every brothel owner or pimp or male customer, there are 50 girls who are arrested for being prostitutes. Other countries have tried the other way around, and it works beautifully…they bring the charges against the brothel owners and the pimps and the male customers, and they do not prosecute the girls, who quite often are brought into that trade involuntarily. It works quite well, by the way.