Obviously, a big part of the American Revolution was there would be no Church of England the way there was in England. There was a specific attempt not to have an established church.

We have never had a president of the United States or a nominee of a major party who was a Supreme Court law clerk.

For a long time, the Court has moved toward outlawing all forms of racial preference, including affirmative action, and Obama seems accepting, even supportive, of the change.

Beyond diversity, the story of Obama's influence on the courts is more complex. Indeed, it could serve as a metaphor for his Presidency: symbolically rich but substantively hazy. Obama took office after years of intense conservative focus on the courts.

When Obama took office, Republican appointees controlled ten of the thirteen circuit courts of appeals; Democratic appointees now constitute a majority in nine circuits. Because federal judges have life tenure, nearly all of Obama's judges will continue serving well after he leaves office.

The transformation of the D.C. Circuit has been replicated in federal courts around the country. Obama has had two hundred and eighty judges confirmed, which represents about a third of the federal judiciary.

Courtney Vance and I are college classmates, weirdly enough. We're both Harvard class of 1982. Courtney, as a work-study job, was a typesetter at the Harvard 'Crimson,' the newspaper where I worked.

I grew up, like most people in my generation, watching John Travolta. I was thrilled to meet him.

Rodney King is a progenitor of all these cell phone videos that we have. It was unusual that a person had a video camera to take a picture of the Rodney King beating. Now, of course, everybody has a phone, and that has been one of the key factors in all the new attention to the issue.

One of the main things I know about O.J. Simpson is that he is a compulsive talker. So if I were to ask him one question, I would get 45 minutes on the history of the case. It would be irrelevant what I would ask him - he would just start talking.