There are some lawyers who think of themselves as basically instruments of whoever their clients are, and they pride themselves on their professional craft.

There is no proportional representation requirement in the Equal Protection Clause.

Catholicism is a wide tent in terms of political and legal positions. We could have nine Catholics on the Supreme Court and a great deal of diversity toward the law.

As a matter of history, the Fourteenth Amendment was not understood to ban segregation on the basis of race.

There are some lawyers who think of themselves as basically instruments of whoever their clients are, and they pride themselves on their professional craft.

A few weeks ago, I was at the gym, talking to a friend about politics. Overhearing the conversation, a young man - maybe 25 years old - interrupted to say, 'Obama? He hasn't done a single thing!'

After a two-term presidency, many young voters seem to want someone who is radically different from, even the opposite of, the commander in chief to whom they have become accustomed. After all, a two-term president will have led their nation for a significant percentage of their lives. That's boring. Isn't it time for a transformation?

Antonin Scalia was witty, warm, funny, and full of life. He was not only one of the most important justices in the nation's history; he was also among the greatest.

As an academic, a great deal of my time is spent writing, with very little in meetings. In government, the premium is placed on figuring things out through discussing them with other people.

As presidents from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama have recognized, the real question is whether regulations, whether new or old, are justified. That requires a careful analysis of their costs and their benefits.

At least since 1947, the historical record seems to support a simple conclusion: If you want the American economy to grow, you ought to put a Democrat in the Oval Office.

Behavioral scientists distinguish between fast thinking and slow thinking. Fast thinking is represented in the mind's System 1: it is automatic, intuitive, and often emotional. Slow thinking, reflected in System 2, is deliberative and reflective; it likes statistics. It's hard to think of a purer System 1 candidate than Trump.

Bottom 10 Percent progressives are not enthusiastic about concentrations of wealth. But that's not what keeps them up at night. Their focus is on deprivation and lack of opportunity. They're motivated by empathy for people who are suffering, rather than outrage over unjustified wealth.

Concerned about re-election, interest-group reactions, the media, or fundraising, many legislators have found it in their interest to refuse to cooperate with members of the opposing party - or to treat them as enemies in some kind of war, in which the whole point is to defeat and humiliate them. But the American people have been the real losers.

Democrats pride themselves on their commitment to science. Citing climate change, they contend that they are the party of truth, while Republicans are 'denialists.' But with respect to genetically modified organisms, many Democrats seem indifferent to science, and to be practicing a denialism of their own - perhaps more so than Republicans.

Democrats want to use government power to make people's lives go better; Republicans respond that people know more than politicians do. We think that both might be able to agree that nudging can maintain free markets, and liberty, while also inclining people in good directions.

Donald Trump has taken a battering ram to longstanding political norms - the unwritten conventions that make governance possible. But even before he decided to run for president, those norms were under assault.

Donald Trump may not speak explicitly of 'who we are,' but with his promise to make America great again, he engages in his own kind of identity politics, signaling that the nation has lost its sense of self. That gets to people.

Donald Trump promises to impose, soon after his inauguration, a new requirement on federal agencies: If they want to issue a new regulation, they have to rescind two regulations that are now on the books. The idea of 'one in, two out' has rhetorical appeal, but it's going to be extremely hard to pull off.

Employers, like most people, tend to trust their intuitions. But when employers decide whom to hire, they trust those intuitions far more than they should.

Every human being has an assortment of diverse identities, and it greatly matters which one is triggered by social situations, which hold up different kinds of mirrors. The same is true for nations.

Facebook seems to think that it would be liberating if everyone's News Feed could be personalized so that people see only and exactly what they want. Don't believe it. That's a prison.

For any child, boy or girl, a father is both Jedi and Sith: Obi-Wan Kenobi - gentle and calming and good - and Vader, fierce and terrifying.

For business, government, and education, the lesson is clear: People ought to be relying far more on objective information and far less on interviews. They might even want to think about scaling back or cancelling interviews altogether. They'll save a lot of time - and make better decisions.

For consumers, the lesson is simple: Genetically modified foods are safe to eat.

From the standpoint of democratic legitimacy, it's a problem if half the electorate, or close to it, declines to vote, not least because they may not feel much of a stake in the whole process.

Having a constant productive anxiety doesn't mean that people are miserable and wailing but that people know they will be held accountable if things do not go right.

Here's a more controversial idea: In general, Democrats and progressives ought to allow Trump considerable room to choose his own employees - far more room than Republicans allowed during the Obama administration. Tit-for-tat is a dangerous game.

Humility is of central importance; I think it's an underappreciated virtue in the contemporary discussion of law and politics.

I am a huge Red Sox fan.

I am a professional squash player, and I recently played badly - but as well as I could - in a professional squash tournament. A professional squash player might sound like someone who is in a food-tasting group, but it is a racquet sport.

I confess I'm a big fan of Taylor Swift.

I love Richard Thaler's 'Quasi Rational Economics.' A collection of some of his most interesting and inventive essays, the real foundation of behavioral economics.

I strongly believe that the Second Amendment creates an individual right to possess and use guns for purposes of both hunting and self-defense.

I think President Obama has been an extraordinarily successful president, and that this period will record that with a bunch of exclamation points. But obviously, not everybody thinks that.

I think it's a very firm part of human nature that if you surround yourself with like-minded people, you'll end up thinking more extreme versions of what you thought before.

I think that every state in the union should recognize same-sex marriage.

I think the arc of history is long, and it bends toward justice. And I think that's what the 'Star Wars' message is. You know, the dark side is in the human heart. And chaos is very troubling for an individual or for a culture, which can lead you to authoritarian leaders. But the arc of history is on the right side. I believe that.

I would reject the distinction between a Keynesian moment and a behavioral moment.

I'm interested in how the Internet spreads information.

If I may discuss the idea of explosion. The number of regulations issued in the last two years is approximately the same as the number issued in the last two years of the Bush administration.

If a company has acted badly, people want to punish it - not in order to deter future misconduct, but simply because they're outraged. And the more outraged they are, the more punishment they want to inflict.

If a major source of the nation's news is personalizing user experiences, people with different points of view will end up in echo chambers of their own design. Facebook didn't create that problem, but it shouldn't aggravate it.

If interviewers are prejudiced against women or Hispanics, for example, a face-to-face interview will predictably result in discrimination. Reliance on tests, or on actual or past performance, can promote equality.

If the air quality is terrible in Los Angeles, if a particular university is unusually expensive, if crime is on the rise in Dallas, or if a company has a lot of recalled toys, transparency can spur change. Whenever public or private institutions have to answer to the public, their performance is likely to improve.

If the prospect of a bad result gets the heart racing - a plane crash, a terrible disease, a loss of 30 percent of your portfolio - most people will take strong steps to avoid it. They will pay too little attention to a comforting thought, which is that worst-case scenarios usually don't come to fruition.

If there's a regulation that's saving 10,000 lives and costing one job, it's worth it.

If you have an architecture of control, let's say, where you select in advance everything that's going to affect your life, then you're going to live in a very small world that will have an echo chamber feature... Pandora, which I love, actually feeds into that.

If you like dark movies or light movies, 'The Empire Strikes Back' is one of the great movies of all time. It's probably the greatest movie of all time. 'A New Hope' is a superb movie. It's probably the second-greatest movie of all time, but 'The Empire Strikes Back' is better.