After a week, it's better. I miss her. I mourn her. But some peace has returned. She had been so unattainable - so young, so much a citizen of a different era - that it is hard to feel fully deprived.

Nobody ever gets what they want when it comes to love.

Basbanes makes you love books.

At the end of the day, perhaps the best argument against capital punishment may be that it is an issue beyond the limited capacity of government to get things right.

'Torts' more or less means 'wrongs'...One of my friends said that Torts is the course which proves that your mother was right.

The law, for all its failings, has a noble goal - to make the little bit of life that people can actually control more just. We can't end disease or natural disasters, but we can devise rules for our dealings with one another that fairly weigh the rights and needs of everyone, and which, therefore, reflect our best vision of ourselves.

I have a hard time isolating what it is in myself that makes me so fascinated with the theme of identity, because I came from a normal upper middle-class family. And yet, as I look back at my books, the uses of power, issues of identity, they have - it's recurrent. It happens again and again.