When I used to teach civil procedure as a law professor, I would begin the year by telling my students that “civil procedure is the etiquette of ritualized battle.” The phrase, which did not originate with me, captured the point that peaceful, developed societies resolve disputes by law rather than by force.

Biological sex should not determine what we are capable of, what we aspire to, what we do in our life.

Over my lifetime, women have demonstrated repeatedly that they can do anything that men can do, while still managing traditional women's work at the same time. But the same expansion of roles has not been available to men.

The international community cannot stand by and watch the massacre of Libyan protesters. In Rwanda we watched. In Kosovo we acted.

What I'm suggesting is we are going to look back, and we're going to see what happened in Syria, and we're going to see the larger destabilization of the Middle East, the rise of extremism, and we're going to wonder... Why didn't we at least try to force a political solution - at an acceptable cost to us, because no one is saying we should send in ground troops - and if we did it would be worse than doing nothing... If we do not act, we are going to look back and wonder why we didn't.

In foreign policy, even if you hold high office, you can't be sure what the effects will be of the things you do.

When we talk about gender pay gaps in the United States, and if you look at women without children, they earn 96 cents for every dollar that a man is earning, while for mothers it is about 76 cents. That's nearly 25 percent less. For single mothers, the situation is even worse. One third of them are living in poverty or just on the edge of poverty. This is an unacceptable situation.