Transcript: I’m going to cheat a little bit and give you two questions we should be asking ourselves. First and most important question: “How ought we to live?” as opposed to what we tend to ask: “How are we to force other people to live?” So I think the first thing all of us can ask ourselves is, “How should we live?” How do we inspire our neighbors? If we care about global warming, let’s not put as our first question, “Therefore what should we regulate?” “Therefore what should we do and try to inspire this by our example.” That seems to be the first and most important question: “How ought we to live?” And then second, “How can I myself, by trying to be less certain of myself, promote public dialogue by opening my mind to the possibility that I may be wrong?” If we would each ask ourselves those two questions – how would I live, and how am I to stop acting like those who disagree with me are evil – if we could just do those two things, I think we could advance dialogue in America and in the west generally, and perhaps in the world enormously.

Recorded on: 7/25/07

Transcript:  Ted Turner gave this interview.  He said, “What good could a second billion dollars do?”  How many houses can you use?  How many jets can you own?”  So give the rest of it away.  But if I were giving money away, I would probably give it mostly to the direct service providers as people who are actually . . . or that are actually providing research.  Say if they’re doing cancer research or AIDS research.  The actual researchers and the people actually providing on the ground services to people.  Because there are plenty of think tanks.  There are plenty of think tanks that can get a lot of money to turn in a lot of position papers.  And some of them are useful position papers; but what tend to be underfunded by private donors today are people giving the services on the ground.  Little things that aren’t sexy.  Soup kitchens.  You know food closets.  Things like that.  Those are desperately underfunded by private donors who give to the big __________ get something named after yourself and so on.  I think to give the money to causes like that.  And something else.  I think I might give away money to establish writing programs.  Writing programs especially in the inner city, but elsewhere as well – in rural areas; places where a lot of times all the kids certainly go to school, but they don’t get the individual encouragement to think about the possibly you may have the talent to be a writer.  Let’s try that out and see.  ___________ people tend to write a lot tend to think a lot.  And we need more people who think a lot, and I’d like to encourage that.

Recorded on: 7/25/07

Transcript:  If we were to raise the level of public dialogue, it starts with humility – with our own personal humility.  It starts with a sense of ourselves; recognizing the possibility that no matter how passionate we are, we could be wrong.  We could be wrong.  And maybe each of us should have one or two things that we think it’s impossible to be wrong about – genocide, for example.  That’s not a debatable issue.  But you know what?  The problem is that most of us have 20 or 25 issues on which we think we couldn’t possibly be wrong, and that’s where the problem arises.  We don’t just have one or two.  Apart . . . separating out the one or two issues in which we think there is no possibility of error, I think we have to be very humble about other things.  And humility means recognizing in everyday conversations like this one the possibility of error; and therefore listening to what the other side has to say, and listening to it in a serious and thoughtful way.  But we can only raise the level of our dialogue if we’ll do little things like take the bumper stickers off our cars.  I really mean that very sincerely; that the bumper sticker world is a world of slogans, and is a world that doesn’t care to hear debates.  It is a remarkably wonderful symbol that bumper stickers are on the back of the car; that the person driving the car is facing away from the person reading the bumper sticker as though to say, “Here is my view.  It is not debatable.  You read it.  I’m through discussing the matter.”  That’s very dangerous, and it’s very scary.  I think if we take the bumper stickers off our car and take it out of our voices, we will already have taken a big step toward improving our public dialogue.  ___________ fantasy in which then all those talking heads on the news just report the news anymore, but that’s just a fantasy.

Recorded on: 7/25/07

Transcript: My outlook for the future is guarded. As a Christian, I am not permitted to despair; but I’m also not permitted to claim that everything is rosy, you see? That as a Christian, my view has to be that the world is broken and will always be broken until what a lot of people call “the end times” or something like that. And because it’s broken that means it’ll be imperfect. People will be wounded. People will be hurt. And the question for me in the future is, “Will we do a better job understanding we owe people in their woundedness and their brokenness? Will we do better understanding and trying to heal people and help people or not?” I just hope for a world in which we spend less time thinking . . . obsessing about ourselves in the midst of our luxury – “I didn’t get that promotion,” that sort of thing – and think more about those who are maybe not enjoying our luxury in the same sense. But am I hopeful and am I optimistic or not? I don’t know the answer to that. I can only say that I’m guarded, that I think about it a lot; but I can’t predict a trend.

Recorded on: 7/25/07

Transcript: I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that candidates for public office are going to have good solutions to the crisis of integrity in our life – in our public life. And it’s not because politicians can’t have integrity. Of course they can. I don’t dump on politicians the way some people do. It’s because it’s not a problem the government can fix. It’s a problem that we have to decide to fix in our private lives. I would like to see candidates talk more about poverty; but I worry a lot that Democrat and Republican candidates alike use it mainly as a club to hit us over the head. It’s not so much whether they’re committed to in their campaigns in a serious way. It’s more a tool for making other people look bad. It’s really unfortunate. If you look at the trends, for example, in the black community, the trend toward income stratification – that is the well-to-do black people getting better off, and the worse-off people getting worse off – that’s gotten worse under the Bush administration. It got worse under the Clinton administration. It’s just been getting worse for years. It’s not a left-right thing. It’s just been getting worse, and getting worse, and getting worse. Most of the trends . . . there are some that are on an uptick. Most of the trends in the black community that are troubling, and that are going in the wrong direction have been going in the wrong direction for a long time. So it’s not a matter of which party is in power; it’s that it takes more to fix them. There’s a need for public solutions. There’s a need for some policies. There’s also a need for private solutions; a need for people to try to fix some things from within as well. I’m not terribly sanguine about our willingness to do either one of those things. I’m not terribly sanguine about our willingness to do the things that will cost money in the public sector. I’m not terribly sanguine about our ability to encourage marriage, which might cost people ideological points. And if we can’t do those things then I don’t know what the future is for these problems. I honestly don’t know what it is we’re going to do. And understand, when I say poverty, I mean it’s an absolute sense. I don’t mean . . . I don’t care in America if rich people get really rich. I don’t care about who’s got the most money. I’m interested in people at the other end. It’s not that, oh goodness, the rich people have money; the poor people don’t. I’m interested in why is the reason people don’t have money is because rich people have money; or is there some other reason? It’s important to know why poor people are suffering – to be able to fix their suffering. And I think too often we guess at why they’re suffering. And sometimes we guess wrong. Sometimes we guess wrong. And yes, sometimes there are some problems that could be not repaired, but it’s __________ we’d spend more money and I wish we would. But not every problem can be helped along that way.

Recorded on: 7/25/07

Transcript: One is the issues of . . . that we think of as the practical issues. And here enough to go are the ones which are always mentioned – race and poverty. The racial divide and the poverty divide in America is huge. It’s a gigantic problem, and it’s a problem unfortunately we tend to view through ideological lenses. So there are people who look at it and they say, “Well that’s a right wing exclusion so we can’t do it.” And people look at it and they say, “That’s a left wing exclusion. We can’t do it.” It strikes me: Why do we have to be either or people? Why can’t we be both end people? I’ll give you one example in the world of poverty. Democrats tend to wanna spend more money on job training and repairing the infrastructure of the inner city. This is a really good idea. This is desperately needed. That’s one ___________. Republicans tend to wanna spend money on propping up families in the inner city and creating better family structures. That’s a really good idea. That’s desperately needed. Why does it have to be that I have to do it the liberal way or the conservative way? Why can’t we look around for ideas that might actually do some good and not worry about their further ideological implications or what else they complicate? The reason is because race is so low on the agenda, and poverty is so low on the agenda that with every issue, we think about how it will affect every other issue that’s more important. And that’s why we can’t do anything about race or poverty, because unless they’re at the top of the agenda, and you don’t worry about what happens to another issue as a result, you’re not gonna fix it because you’ll constantly be shying away from things that’ll hurt some other constituency.

But there’s another crisis also that I wanna mention that’s not amenable to these kinds of __________. There is an integrity crisis, I think, in America. Integrity measured the old fashioned way. If you think of integrity as having a sense of how one ought to live and try to live that way, it’s very hard to get people focused on the idea there might be a right or wrong way to live. I don’t mean a right or wrong way for everybody to live. It’s hard to ___________ folks __________ on the notion there might be a right way for themselves to live. They ought to spend time contemplating not just, “How do I want to live? What do I want to own? What do I want to do?” But, “How ought I to live?” And I want to put the question that way. We’re really good at thinking of how ought other people to live. Everybody can do that really well. What about me? What about other people? How ought I to live? We don’t spend enough time thinking about that. We spend too much time thinking about ways to force others to do what we ourselves ought to be doing. And that, I think, is the first question integrity demands to us: “How ought I to live?” and then find the discipline to try to do that. And that’s something I think is dying in America – that sense of a distinction between how do I want to live and how ought I to live?

Recorded on: 7/25/07

Transcript: I think that our parents’ generation, for whom democracy is under threat – under threat from the Great Depression and under threat from fascism – they used democracy better. They used democracy better. I had lunch a few years ago with a retiring politician who was a very senior politician, and he talked about when he was first coming along in Washington. And he said when he was coming along in the ‘60s, that people could vehemently disagree on the floor of the House of Representatives one day, and that night go out to dinner with each other’s families and have a good time. Because he said they had been through so much together – the war, the Depression and other things – they understood their commonality across their differences. But, he said, for them, this new crowd . . . He said the new crowd – and he meant Democrats and Republicans alike . . . for the new crowd it’s personal. “They generally don’t like each other,” and that was how he put it. And that’s true of a lot of people today; that lacking the commonalities . . . having had luxury, therefore lacking common experiences, lacking a common struggle, it’s very easy for us to decide there’s something wrong with people and disagree with them when we never had to experience our human commonalities.

Recorded on: 7/25/07

Transcript: No one knows all the answers, but I’ll mention two of them. Let me say two words: television news. Television news. Fifty years ago when television news was young, the philosophy of television news was basically just broadcasters on television. It was reporters on television, somebody trying to say what happened. That was what they did. You might have 30 minutes of news without a single televised clip of anything. Just somebody that’s just sitting there reading the news, sometimes at great length. That was television news. It was simply an effort to inform. Nowadays in an effort to entertain and to play to the gallery, it matters if there are pictures. It matters if there are jokes you can tell. It matters if you can get people on and yell and scream at each other. That’s really taking us down a sad path. Everyone says it, but I think it’s truth. That’s emphasized the notion that the right way to have interaction is to have very strong advocates that will call each other names. One thing that’s striking about the way the news is today. Take an issue – a contested issue – abortion, the war, whatever you like. News today is very good at telling us people’s positions on these issues – candidates. It’s very bad at telling us why they have their positions. It strikes me that one of the jobs of a news reporter is not to say, “So and so is for or against abortion rights.” But what’s so and so’s argument? Why does so and so believe that? I . . . I . . . Years ago I ran into a guy who was a retired reporter for a major newspaper, and he was lamenting what had happened to the news. And he was telling me how when he was coming along in the ‘60s, if the President announced a new Urban Affairs Initiative, the headline would be the next day “President Announces Urban Affairs Initiative”, and the story would be explaining what it was. This is what the President proposed. That’s the story. Today, he said – and we had this meeting in the ‘90s – today he said the story would be “Republicans Attack President’s Urban Affairs Initiative”. And the first paragraph is a brief, token summary of what happened. The second paragraph is somebody attacking it. The third paragraph is somebody defending it. You never take much time to explain what it is. The important thing is who’s going to win, who is going to lose, who is on which side. That’s one thing . . . Certainly that’s to help take us down, but that’s not the only thing. Luxury is the big problem. Luxury. We’ve been a generation – here I speak of myself and the other baby boomers – who have had everything. We don’t feel as though we’ve had everything. We’re constantly complaining. Everything has gone wrong in our lives. But there’s a sense, when compared with the rest of the world, we’ve had everything. We’ve had everything we could want. And that’s given us a lot of time to ruminate, maybe too much time to ruminate. I think our luxury has made us incautious in how we use democracy.

Recorded on: 7/25/07

Transcript: Democracy can mean a lot of different things; but at minimum to be a democracy, we have to have a system that involves ultimately the judgment of the people; and to make that judgment worthwhile, it has to be a judgment where people actually consult with one another. I think to have a democracy . . . To call something a democracy where people don’t have a respect across their differences for the co-equal people on the other side of issues, I don’t think that’s democracy, whatever else it may be. And I think that whatever form your voting is – whether you have direct representation; whether you have indirect representation; whether you have proportional representation; whether you elect by districts; whether you elect by “winner take all”; whatever it may be, whatever your voting system is, democracy is mainly what proceeds the voting. Democracy is the liberation among citizens. And it involves citizens’ beliefs that what we have to think matters, and should matter to each other; and our ability and our comfort level with sitting, and talking, and also listening, trying to persuade others, but first allowing them to try to persuade us and really allowing the opportunity to really listen to what they have to say instead of dismissing it out of hand. That, to me, is democracy. It’s difficult. It’s rough and tumble. It doesn’t always get quick and efficient answers; but it is the only thing I think we can really do in which people actually participate in governing themselves.

Recorded on: 7/25/07

Transcript: I really think it’s a bad idea when people try to design ways to create a public life, a public square that’s free of religion and “religion talk”, because then people ___________ comfortable talking. Some people like talking economic theory. Some people have a historical view of the world. Some people have a view of the world that comes from their faith. People’s views come from all different sources, and I think it’s important to have a public square that embraces these different ways of looking at the world. And if there’s something that I believe about public life, that’s really it; that it ought to be open, and we ought to really try to have actual dialogue. And the thing about dialogue, to make it real, is we have to engage in listening with our ears. What we tend to do in America is listen with our mouths. We tend to listen to the other fellow’s argument for the sole purpose of spotting the errors so we can refute it. The absurdity that they call presidential debates in America, which are not debates at all but joint press conferences run by and for the media, I think candidates should avoid them like the plague. They’re horrible. But that absurdity captures what I mean. There’s no time there for measured conversation. There’s no time there to explain a position. All you have time to do is lash out, call somebody a name, use the right buzz words and it’s somebody else’s turn. Well that’s not democracy. That’s a mockery. That is simply a . . . an excuse for avoiding what we really need, which is actual conversation across our differences instead of buzz words and name calling across our differences.

Recorded on: 7/25/07

Transcript: I’m inspired by the American system. I don’t mean that America is the greatest nation on earth. It may or may not be; but I think we’ve worked out a system over time that’s actually a pretty good one; that’s a system that’s allowed to work . . . simultaneously gives a kind of safety valve to let off steam as ___________ revolution; but enables us to change over time also, but change over a measured pace. It’s very, very hard in America to do big and dramatic changes; but it’s also very hard for one group to take over and never allow any change. So we tend to change. We tend to make progress, but at the kind of measured pace that avoids a lot of backlash that we might otherwise have. I find that a very inspiring system; and we let it work, I think it tends to move us in the right direction. It doesn’t mean America’s always right. America’s often wrong, as any country is. It’s not that we are “righter” than other people. I think we have a system that’s a little bit better than others at managing change and yet allowing change to happen.

Recorded on: 7/25/07

Transcript: I’m first and foremost a Christian, and that means not only that I draw my inspiration from the Bible, but also for me I’m an Orthodox Christian. So it’s also in the great creeds – the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicaean Creed and so on. And that is a bedrock for my life. And I wouldn’t say that I’m a great Christian in the sense that I always do what I think I ought to do; but I tend to . . . I once read a book by an Episcopal nun – yes there are Episcopal nuns. I once read a book from an Episcopal nun who said that you can’t see the future. And you can’t tell what God wants to do five years from now; but if you look carefully and take the time, you can generally tell what you’re supposed to do right now. And I try to think of things that way. I try to think about what I should do right now. I tend to be a thoughtful person. I tend to be someone . . . I don’t make snap judgments. I like to take time to think things over. And then when I make decisions I tend to stick to them; but they tend to be decisions I made over a period of time. We live in a world that encourages snap judgments, that rewards thinking fast. And I don’t think that makes for very good decision making.

My wife, I should say, is also a great inspiration to me. My wife is not only a Christian, but someone who tries to live her faith and really thinks very hard about the right thing to do. She currently is involved in issues that I think are of great importance. She is trained as a lawyer as I am. She’s with the Children’s Defense Fund as well as being in corporate law before that. She’s now affiliated with a couple of think tanks, and she’s interested in the future of mothering in America and in the world; and she’s interested in the co-modification of children in two senses – both the sense of which we might say the commercialization of childhood – advertising aimed at children, trying to create little consumers; and also co-modification in a different sense – the notion of designer babies and what does that say about humanity, about us, and about our future? She doesn’t go into these things as a shrill advocate. She goes into these things to try to understand the direction we’re moving and to try to encourage conversations about these directions. What I like about her approach is exactly that; that she wants to encourage conversation. What she wants to do is create a world in which people think about issues and then talk about them as opposed to go on television and rant and rave about them. I think that’s the kind of work that I wish more advocates would do. It’s the kind of work that I used to try to do.

Recorded on: 7/25/07

Transcript: Let me tell you a little story. I was a law clerk for Thurgood Marshall – I should have mentioned earlier another person who greatly influenced me. I was a law clerk for him a long time ago in 1980. I got to know him a little better – a lot better – in the last year of his life. He was working on an oral history project for the Federal Judicial Center and I was his interviewer. We didn’t finish the project. We probably got 34, 36 hours of tapes done before he died. Something like that. I don’t remember. But it was very near and dear to his heart, and of course I was very happy to have a role in it, however small that role might have been. And through that year I was one of his many law clerks. And through that experience of being able to listen to him up close for a year, it struck me that I never heard him say a bad word about other people. In fact even when he was talking about people who nowadays who we think of as, say, enemies – the segregationists . . . some of the great segregationists of the age . . . And we’re talking about a man who, long before he was on the Supreme Court, used to try civil rights cases in little local courts, often at risk to his life having to escape lynch mobs in the middle of the night. Not only did I never hear him say a bad word about anyone, but he went out of his way to say good words about people. I remember once I asked him about one particular segregationist lawyer, and I remember so clearly Justice Marshall answering, “He was a good man. He was a great man who just happened to believe in segregation.” He wasn’t being facetious. He wasn’t making fun; he was making a point. And his point seemed to be that even across what I think was the greatest moral divide of the 20th century in the United States – racial segregation – he would look at his opponents – not his enemies ever, but his opponents – and find the common humanity that would enable him to say, “They were good people but for this.” That wasn’t just a tool; that actually made a difference. Because one of the things . . . The untold story of Thurgood Marshall’s work was the time that he spent in back rooms all over the South, as he would say, playing cards and drinking whiskey – making deals with some great segregationist because he said, “You could do business with him. His word was good.” That was a very high compliment coming from Thurgood Marshall. He’d shake hands with them and make a deal. And that side of life is largely forgotten. The notion that we ought to be able to see beyond our differences, sit down with these people with whom we have strong disagreements and see their common humanity; that’s largely gone or it’s dying anyway. And I would like to see a movement back in that direction. I would like to see more and more people of very strong political views sitting down with people who feel differently. Not sitting down and yelling and screaming. Not sitting down and feeling contemptuous; but sitting down and looking for the genuine humanity in people on the other side of really very, very important issues. Because if we don’t find that common humanity, we can’t do business together. And if we can’t do business together, then we’re back again into the politics of mob rule, which is who gets the bigger mob rather than how can we craft compromised solutions to difficult problems so that every democracy can use them to move forward.

Recorded on: 7/25/07

Transcript: My proudest achievements are my children. I mean that very sincerely. I think that for a parent the most important thing is preparing the next generation, or helping to prepare the next generation. I’ll be very honest with you. I think that a lot of the public work that I’ve done in my non-fiction writing, it’s been a failure. That is I had an . . . I had a goal in a lot of my writing to try to nudge conversation a little bit closer to a norm in which we actually saw across our differences a common, beloved humanity in those with whom we have strong disagreements. That’s my goal in different ways, whether I’ve been writing about religion and politics, or civility in public life, or a lot of the other books I’ve written – that’s been my general goal. And all I’ve seen, to my despair, is that getting worse instead of better; that day-by-day, week-by-week, month-by-month, year-by-year, it’s simply getting worse. And so in that sense, I don’t at the moment feel terribly optimistic about our politics. I hope for the best. I pray for the best. I still sometimes work for the best; but I feel that the mission I feel I was on at one point is a mission that did not succeed, and I think really didn’t make much of a difference.

Recorded on: 7/25/07

Transcript: I don’t share the same view that a lot of law professors have that somehow the court’s the place to resolve important issues. The issues that the court solves are important. I’m not saying that the court’s unimportant. I’m saying the great issues that face our society are not issues that are susceptible to judicial resolution. So for example . . . Let me give examples of two of the great challenges the courts knew nothing about. They’re very different. One is the challenge of race and poverty in America. The reason that race and poverty continues to be a challenge is largely because politics left it behind. It’s politics that will help solve this, not courts. And politicians of both parties have long ago left race for issues that they find more interesting. They may give lip service to it, but it’s not high on anyone’s agenda at all. I was on a TV talk show . . . oh it must have been a year ago. And we were supposed to talk about the issues we thought were really important in the coming couple of years. And I kept saying race and poverty, and I was shouted down almost by acclamation by everyone else on the show. They said there are all these other things we have to get to first. And in the green room afterwards, this one person . . . this one liberal activist started yelling at me basically saying how could I bring this up when there are really important things to fix like global warming and the war and so on. I’m not saying those aren’t important issues. It’s just that what’s happened over the last 30 years is every time one wants to talk about race and poverty; every time one wants to bring up race or poverty, it always turns out there’s something more important that has to be done first. That’s one kind of issue. There’s an entirely different kind of issue. Some of the writing I’ve done . . . the non-fiction writing I’ve done has been about ethics in private rather than in public life – integrity and civility for example. I really believe we have reached a crisis point in America in our treatment of other people, particularly people we disagree with. I worry greatly about our inability to sustain conversations across our differences; about our deterioration of a bumper sticker society. Here I agree with what a lot of sociologists and historians wrote half a century ago; that if you have a politics that is mainly about who to hate and who to love; that’s mainly about slogans, and applause, and emotional appeal; it’s not a democratic politics – it is a fascist politics. It is a deeply reactionary politics. It’s a politics about rule, and I worry about that in America – that on left and right, we’re so caught up in who to love and who to hate, who to cheer for and who to boo, and what bumper sticker to put on our car that we have no interest in politics and the sense of the give and take of difficult decisions where you’ve gotta please both sides. We’re interested in winning, and we’re interested in putting together a bigger mob. That absolutely terrifies me for the future of this country because it has nothing to do with democracy.

Recorded on: 7/25/07

Transcript: I’ve written about the term “judicial philosophy” for many years, and I’ll say again what I’ve said many times: I don’t think such a thing exists. I think . . . I’m skeptical of the notion that there’s such a thing as judicial philosophy. And I think that when we see the term bandied about on the evening news, or on the Op Ed pages, it is simply a . . . It’s a __________. It’s a metaphor. It’s a metaphor for how would you decide cases? What would be the actual outcomes that you would reach? I am a lot less concerned with what outcomes a judge is going to reach than if a judge, like every public official, is going to do their job with a sense of humility. What worries me most in public life is power. What worries me is the exercise of power. And I think that judges in America should recognize – whether they’re on the local municipal court or the Supreme Court of the United States – that _________ with enormous authority, and that they should use it judiciously. Judiciously. I think they should act with a degree of humility. I think that judges should not be in the business . . . This is whether we think of them as conservatives or liberals, as simply trying to say, “At last I’m finally a judge! I can set things right!” That’s the worst attitude for anyone to have, whether it’s a judge, a president, a mayor, whoever it might be. I think that what is called for in people who have great power is great humility. And so whatever it may be that a judge’s philosophy might be, what is important to me is we believe the judge might exercise that philosophy with a degree of humility.

Recorded on: 7/25/07

Transcript: I’ve often wondered why it is that I write mainly mysteries and thrillers. They say writers are the worst people to ask about their own creative processes. But I’ve actually developed a theory about this. You might notice that when lawyers and law professors turn to fiction, a lot of them write thrillers or mysteries. That’s been true not just recently, but over many, many years – especially with mysteries. And I have a theory about why that is. Think for a minute about why people hate lawyers. Because you go to your lawyer for something simple like writing a will, and you sit down and you think you’re done, and the lawyer starts saying, “Have you thought of this? Have you thought of that? Have you thought of this, and this, and this that might happen?” People hate that, but that’s what lawyers are trained to do. When I’m working as a law professor, from the first hour of the first day of law school, what they’re learning is whatever they think the settled answer is, there’s always another question – a question of the form, “What if this happens? What if this happens?” What lawyers do more than anything else, they think about and plan for contingencies, hypotheticals. Well isn’t that what a thriller is? Isn’t that what a mystery is? “What if this happens,” the writer thinks, and decides to make it happen; that there’s something about that form of writing I think lends itself to a legal imagination; lends itself to the way that lawyers’ minds naturally work. So then it’s not any wonder that I and many other lawyers and law professors are drawn in to mysteries and thrillers – something with tension and surprises – as the form of writing that we are most comfortable with.

Recorded on: 7/25/07

Transcript: When I’m writing a novel I start with characters. I’m interested in people first of all, characters first of all. I think of people I’d like to write about. In this case, the most recent, people from my earlier novel – minor characters I wanted to write a novel about. I think of people that I wanted to write about . . . that I’d like to write about, and I think about what their family lives are like, where they would live. And then I think about what would strain their family ties. Whatever is normal life to them. However they negotiated the snares and difficulties of everyday living. What would test that? What would pressure that? And that’s how I begin to create the story. So I don’t begin by thinking, “Let me test some theme about race, or religion, or law, or government or something.” I begin by thinking of characters and asking myself, “What kind of setting can I put them in?”

Recorded on: 7/25/07

Transcript: I do a lot of things today, and the first things that I do today are not about my work because I think of myself first, I admit, as a husband and a father. And those are my highest duties, the ones I take the most seriously. Maybe that’s a part of my Christianity, I don’t know; but those are my highest duties. My duty to my neighbor, my duty to be a good citizen is high. I was the head of a Boy Scout troop with a mission to an inner city in New Haven for many, many years. And I think the reason I did that wasn’t so much for the fun of it. I’m not gonna claim that I enjoyed it that much. I probably didn’t. But it seemed to me something I ought to be doing. I think really that was a big part of it. But what I do otherwise is I’m a law professor and I’m a writer. I teach and I write. Teaching, to me, is fundamental to human experience. We all teach every day by example whether we want to or not. I teach, I admit, particularly arcane subjects. I teach law. I create future lawyers. I don’t know if that’s a valuable social enterprise or not. I certainly hope that it is. But in the work that I’ve done as a scholar – and I’ve been writing . . . I’ve been a legal scholar for a quarter century now. In the work that I have done as a legal scholar, I’m particularly interesting in the ways that law can and should be used to constrain power. I’m a lot less interested in what we should use law, as I said before, to force people to do or to keep them from doing. I’m interested in how to use law to constrain power, public or private. That really is, to me, quite important because I think that so much human misery comes when power – whether public or private power – cannot be resisted; where there’s no forces to stand against it. And I believe in those forces of many different kinds to stand against power. That motivates me as a legal scholar. It motivates me as a commentator on public issues. It also motivates me in another life. I’m also a novelist. I write novels. I’ve written two best-selling novels. And in my novels, I’m often confronting people. The novels are . . . I guess you’d call them thrillers. And yet within the thriller structure, what strikes me as important is how to constrain power. I don’t mean how is the bad guy gonna lose and the good guy gonna win. I mean to see how bad guys are created in a sense by power unconstrained; by something inside . . . the way there’s something inside each of us that can rise to the surface at unexpected moments can take advantage of not being restrained. I’m not saying there are no evil people in the world. I think there are. But I also think there are a lot of people who wouldn’t seem to act the way they do if they lived in a world where they themselves had a stronger sense of constraint, of limits on what they’re able to do.

Recorded on: 7/25/07

Transcript: I’m a very long way from understanding what justice is. I’ve always been of the Isaiah Berlin view. Isaiah Berlin is one of my favorite philosophers, and his view in a nutshell – it’s a little oversimplified, I guess – was that if you know for sure what justice is, you’re probably gonna start killing people next. That is, his view is that most of the mystery . . . I’m sorry. His view is that most of the misery in our history and the world’s history has come because someone has thought they know the single truth, or the truth in the face of which all other truths must fall. It could be a single religious truth, a single _________ or cultural truth. It could be a single ideological truth. When you know the one thing that’s the most important thing, the one crystal truth, his fear was that’s when you start letting all the ordinary barriers that keep us from doing terrible things fall because you want to do that terrible thing. So I am a long way from claiming that I know what justice is. A part of me simply wants us to follow the golden rule: Love the neighbor. And I guess most people would endorse that. But it’s awfully hard sometimes to figure out what love is. And it’s awfully hard sometimes to figure out what the neighbor is. And because of those difficulties, I’m a great believer in being modest in our claims of what we should force other people to do. In fact, one of the things that confuses me and scares me about politics today in the United States and much of the world is that so much of the political debate is about what we should force people to do, what we should prohibit them from doing. __________ left and the right __________. _________different things I want to force and prohibit. And I don’t have a sufficiently powerful sense of my own righteousness to be able to think first and foremost about what I should force people to do. I have to think first and foremost about how I’m supposed to live myself, my own life, and what I’m supposed to do to encourage others or to inspire them rather than to forbid them or to force them.

Recorded on: 7/25/07