Success is its own reward, but failure is a great teacher too, and not to be feared.

When you come from a background like mine, where you're entering worlds that are so different than your own, you have to be afraid.

When I talk to kids, I often tell them, "I'm going to disappoint you someday. I won't be worth my salt as a judge if I don't render at least one decision that makes you unhappy. Because if I'm following the law - and I don't write them - there has to be some decision you won't like. Please don't judge any person by one act. Take from them the good and don't concentrate on the little things that make you unhappy." That's my approach to family and friends, too.

There are drones flying over the air randomly that are recording everything that's happening on what we consider our private property. That type of technology has to stimulate us to think about what is it that we cherish in privacy, and how far we want to protect it and from whom.

One thing has not changed: to doubt the worth of minority students' achievement when they succeed is really only to present another face of the prejudice that would deny them a chance to even try. It is the same prejudice that insists all those destined for success must be cast from the same mold as those who have succeeded before them, a view that experience has already proven a fallacy.

Reaching a conclusion has to start with what the parties are arguing, but examining in all situations carefully the facts as they prove them or not prove them, the record as they create it, and then making a decision that is limited to what the law says on the facts before the judge.

It is very important when you judge to recognize that you have to stay impartial. That's what the nature of my job is. I have to unhook myself from my emotional responses and try to stay within my unemotional, objective persona.