My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime usually do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed only for those exceptionally rare circumstances when all other rights have failed. A free people can only afford to make this mistake once.

The First Amendment is really at the very core of political speech, and political speech is at the core of the First Amendment. So, we want to be very careful to make sure that candidates for office are free to express their views so that people will make an informed choice. We don't want them holding back, and sort of concealing their views and then disclosing them afterwards.

If we as a society are willing to take away human life, we should be willing to watch it.

Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as underprotecting it. Creativity is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new: Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it's supposed to nurture.

Appellate review is not a magic wand and we undermine public confidence in the judicial process when we make it look like it is.

My advice would be to whoever is going after judges by name, whether it's the president or anybody else, I think it's a terrible idea. I don't think it's a very smart thing to do a Muslim ban.

This is really a pretty good system you have here. What do you call it? "Due process". We're very proud of it.