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.

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

People talk of me as being the inventor of the legal thriller.

On the streets, unrequited love and death go together almost as often as in Shakespeare.

The issue is not whether there are horrible cases where the penalty seems "right". The real question is whether we will ever design a capital system that reaches only the "right" cases, without dragging in the wrong cases, cases of innocence or cases where death is not proportionate punishment. Slowly, even reluctantly, I have realized the answer to that question is no- we will never get it right.

I count myself as one of millions of Americans whose life simply would not be the same without the libraries that supported my learning.

Widespread public access to knowledge, like public education, is one of the pillars of our democracy, a guarantee that we can maintain a well-informed citizenry.