Ninety-five percent of the work in the attorney general's office is civil litigation and regulatory work, and I think I certainly have a lot more experience in that than most of the folks who have served in the office.
You can gesture at the transnational problem of Islamist terrorism all you like, but it's just hot air unless you invest in proper security on the ground in your own country, with the right safeguards to civil liberties.
By international standards, many of the U.K.'s policies for civil society are exemplary. However, there are concerns about constraints on civil liberties - particularly restrictions on free assembly and about the rising tide of everyday regulation has seriously impeded community activity - from organising street parties to helping children.
We reached a high point in my opinion with the passage of the civil rights legislation and Martin Luther King's success and the crusade of others. I think we kind of breathed a sigh of relief as if we had achieved the end of racial discrimination or white supremacy.
It is aspiring tyrants who say that 'civil liberties end when an attack on our safety begins.' Conversely, leaders who wish to preserve the rule of law find other ways to speak about real terrorist threats, and certainly do not invent them or deliberately make them worse.
It's just too late to ban all guns. There are 300 million. We should've done that after the Civil War - that's when we should've taken away guns and defined what militias were. But we didn't do it then, and we can't now.
By the time of the Civil War, there were many kinds of apples growing across the United States, but most of them didn't taste very good, and as a rule, people didn't eat them. Cider was cheaper to make than beer, and many settlers believed fermented drinks were safer than water. Everyone drank hard cider.
Separate is not equal. Civil unions are civil unions. Marriage is marriage. They're different institutions.
We do need to think about how we have security - everyone has a right to that - but we also need to think about how we maintain civil rights and personal freedom.
All lawyers are going to have to - if we really want to attain civil justice - address the issue of how complicated we have made the laws: what we have done to ensnarl the American people in bureaucratic rules and regulations that make access to services or compliance with the law sometimes difficult, if not impossible.
My first jobs were all civil service. At 14, I worked for the Canadian National Railways. At 16, I worked for the Canadian Penitentiary Service.
As for civil liberties, any one who is not vigilant may one day find himself living, if not in a police state, at least in a police city.
The seemingly omnipresent storm clouds hanging over the Constitution often make it hard to find a silver lining. Every day, the front page of The Drudge Report is littered with stories of government assaults on our civil liberties - from local government officials all the way up to the Oval Office.
You can't put civil rights on the ballot.
I believe in civil liberties for homosexuals. I guess I'd have to say I'd draw the line at letting them teach in the schools.
Probably half the cases of Civil War dead were not identified. And so there was no way to let loved ones know, and there were no regularized processes in either Northern or Southern Army for notifying next of kin.
The history of America is to expand civil liberties in a responsible and civil manner. We need to remember that our wonderful Democracy with its freedoms has been working.
The social issues outside of football are not as defined as they were earlier, when integration took place and certain rights were legislated. The Civil Rights movement is over. Individuals can buy homes wherever they want, travel first class wherever they want, eat wherever they want.
Young people have this almost romantic attachment to civil rights, liberties, emancipating people from oppression, etc. The idea that such oppression exists in this country offends me, but it's able to be pushed and sold because education in this country is so woefully incompetent and inept.
We have a fabulous civil rights history here in Birmingham.
With one terrible exception, the Civil War, law and the Constitution have kept America whole and free.
The Civil Rights for Musicians Act is about economic justice for African American artists. It's about what's right. And it's about time.
There has been far too much hypocrisy in the field of civil rights. It is easy enough to give rousing speeches or call for legislation which has no possibility of passage.
When I was 10 years old, I fled my homeland amid the bomb blasts of civil war in Sudan.
One of the reasons I love the law is because I was raised in family - my grandfather was a lawyer, but more importantly, my grandmother was his secretary. And she taught me that lawyers were some of the most civil, most courteous - and in those days, most courtly - people that she knew.
Ip Man was an extraordinary man who lived during extraordinary times. He was born to a rich family when the country was still a monarchy and lived through various civil wars, revolutions, the Japanese invasion, and the establishment of the Republic.
From 1801, Napoleon began an ambitious programme of civil reform to standardise law and justice, centralise education, introduce uniform weights and measures and a fully functioning internal market. That achievement alone makes him one of the giants of history.
Particularly black Americans, many of them, from quotes that I have seen and conversations I've had, are sort of insulted that the civil rights movement is being hijacked - the rhetoric of the civil rights movement is being hijacked for something like same sex marriage. Black Americans tend to have a higher degree of religiosity.
We must protect the very things that make America so special - most certainly including our civil liberties. But we cannot do so without strong national security and a thoughtful and informed discourse.
That a majority of women do not wish for any important change in their social and civil condition, merely proves that they are the unreflecting slaves of custom.
Many civil rights came about, not when they were passed into law, but because the federal government did what it should and saw them enforced.
When the blood of thousands of Americans is shed, the impact lingers. For a generation after the Civil War, the Republican injunction to 'vote as you shot' kept the party dominant for decades; from 1868 to 1912, only one Democrat - Grover Cleveland - won the White House.
One of the main lessons I have learned the last five years as Secretary-General is that the United Nations cannot function properly without the support of the business community and civil society. We need to have tripartite support - the governments, the business communities and the civil society.
If I'm president, there are going to be government vans that drive around and pick up people who shouldn't be wearing certain clothing. Talk about lack of civil rights - I'm sorry, I'm pulling you right off the street, and we're giving you clothes that you're going to be O.K. in.
At a purely practical level, history is important because it provides the basic skills needed for students to go further in sociology, politics, international relations and economics. History is also an ideal discipline for almost all careers in the law, the civil service and the private sector.
You either have a civil society or you don't.
