"Breakfast? No! None of that eating rubbish. You get down with an empty stomach. So you create this system of rewards – if you do this, you can have that. Otherwise you’d never get any work done… I take an hour off and work for an hour. And I work until late, six days a week. The other general rule is, no lunch with anybody. That’s an awful waste of time. And I would never drink in the day. Ever."
"After the 9/11 attacks, the American people became convinced that one of our enemies was Islam, and muslims. And there was lots of talk about how not all muslims are a threat, but nonetheless the fear of Islam and muslims arose and pervaded the country because of the blame that was cast on that group for the 9/11 attacks. And so when it came to the time for government to get the power to do things like put people in prisons without any shred of due process, without the opportunity to be heard in court, or to be charged with a crime, the people they targeted were muslims almost exclusively because of the expectation, which turned out basically to be true, that the fear levels that Americans had of Muslims would make most Americans indifferent to that targetting and would make a lot of other Americans actively supportive of what was being done.
"The [legal] sector is still remarkably fragmented: there are simply too many firms (and too many lawyers) offering the same services without any clear differentiation. Consolidation is an imminent certainty and, furthermore, I expect to see consolidation on an unprecedented scale."
"Over time mainstream opinion comes to recognise that honest beliefs once held by decent people were reprehensible, not because the people were bad, but because the beliefs were shaped by prejudice. This will happen, probably quite soon, with beliefs about sexual orientation."He continued:
"Sincerity is as irrelevant here as malevolence – it simply doesn’t matter why people uphold structures of discrimination. Throughout history, decent, moral people have believed with complete sincerity that slavery is a moral good, that women are lesser beings who must be protected from their weakness by being obedient to men, that Jews should be confined to ghettoes, that the Irish are incapable of rational thought, that Catholics are unfit to live in democracies and so on."He continued:
"This is true even of very great men. Aristotle thought slavery entirely natural. Abraham Lincoln thought for most of his career that when slavery was abolished blacks should be shipped out to Africa because they couldn’t possibly live side by side with free whites. Does this make Aristotle and Lincoln bad men? No. It just makes them examples of highly moral and intelligent people who cannot escape inherited structures of discriminatory thought."He concluded:
"The whole point of the law is that it’s not about giving people equal status because you like them. It’s about freeing people from subjection to the arbitrariness of other people’s benevolence. Gay men and lesbians shouldn’t have to care one way or the other whether the members of the Iona Institute love them or not. Just as the rest of us shouldn’t measure the rights of our fellow citizens by what they get up to in bed."In full here.
Won't be long. But for legal comment follow: @AdamWagner1 @JoshuaRozenberg @carlgardner @Familoo @copyrightgirl @Lyndon_Harris @DBanksy
— Jack of Kent (@JackofKent) January 29, 2014
"Those calling for something to be "banned" should... ask two simple questions. First, what will the prohibition do in respect of the undesired behaviour? And second, what other consequences may flow from the prohibition? Good answers to both these questions will inform the political choice as to whether such a ban should be implemented and, if so, how. We may even get better laws as a consequence; we could even get prohibitions that actually work and are proportionate.
The call for something to be "banned" should be the start of a mature and constructive political debate, and not the end of one. Perhaps the time has come to ban just banning things."In full here.
"Now, I would say I’m closer to doing what I really want to do than I have been at any stage in my life — and I’ve found it without a plan. At first I thought I needed one. Now I’m quite clear that even if I had had a plan, it would have been important to be able to break with it, to follow my nose — and not to be afraid to change plans."
"In the whole history of the United States, no law limiting the rights of a particular class of people has ever stood the test of time, and neither will [laws like the Defense of Marriage Act]."
"Perhaps most radical and most important, it could reintegrate the legal profession with legal education and require that practitioners become stewards of the profession, committed to creating opportunities and mentorship for the newly graduate."
