It's very common to say that Star Wars in the late '70s, that was kind of perfect for Cold War culture and the aftermath of Vietnam in the '60s to have an upbeat, hopeful, cartoonish tale of a hero's journey. I think those explanations are easy to offer and almost always wrong.

If you take anything that succeeded, just imagine it succeeding 10 years before or 10 years after, you could almost always make, with the same plausibility, the "it fit the times" argument.

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

Almost all gun control legislation is constitutionally fine. And, if the court is right, then fundamentalism does not justify the view that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms.

A lot of people are focused on climate change as a defining challenge of our time. A lot of people think it is a non-problem, at least in the United States.

Liberals are sometimes defined as people who can't take their own side in an argument.

I have argued in favor of a reformulation of First Amendment law. The overriding goal of the reformulation is to reinvigorate processes of democratic deliberation, by ensuring greater attention to public issues and greater diversity of views.