Top 99 Quotes & Sayings by Adam Cohen

With increased awareness should come greater caution about how confessions are used at trial - and a greater willingness to overturn convictions when it becomes clear that a confession was untrue.

Too often, animal-rights supporters seem to care about animals to the exclusion of people.

Set in the advertising world of the 1960s, 'Mad Men' is stunning to look at - a Camelot-era parade of smartly dressed professionals lounging around on midcentury modern furniture.

We should craft our laws to allow images of criminal suspects to be captured in public - but also to make sure that the government does not unduly infringe on the privacy rights of innocent citizens.

Civil lawsuits do two important things: they compensate people who are injured by the bad acts of others, and they penalize people and companies for bad behavior.

Mass layoffs produce big winners and losers. Most workers who remain are financially unscathed, even though their employer is struggling.

It makes sense to have cameras in places where terrorism and crime are of particular concern - such as in Times Square or near major bridges and tunnels. It would be more troubling to learn, however, that the government has focused cameras on the front doors of our homes just to keep track of our comings and goings.

The United States may be a religious nation. But it is also a nation with a strong commitment to separation of church and state.

After you pay your E-ZPass bill, there is no reason for the government to keep records of your travel.

When locational information is collected, people should be given advance notice and a chance to opt out. Data should be erased as soon as its main purpose is met.

If you're going to call a book 'The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History,' readers will expect some serious carrying on about race, and Thomas Woods Jr. does not disappoint.

The Enron scandal is worthy of the highest level of scrutiny, both because of the enormity of the crimes that may have been committed and because of what the largest bankruptcy in American history has already begun to reveal about the weaknesses in our nation's corporate structures and regulatory oversight.

To be rejected on account of old age may or may not feel the same as being rejected on the basis of race or sex. But it is clearly unjust and dehumanizing, and the law should take it more seriously than it does.

Regency romances end in marriage; zombie stories end in the zombies being vanquished. 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies' delivers both.

Corporations have enormous treasuries, and there are a lot of things they want from government, many of which clash with the public interest.

There is a lot of talk in conservative circles about judicial modesty and deferring to the political branches. That view of judging often overlooks the important role that courts have in protecting people's rights. But if there was ever a time to defer, it is when Congress is protecting voting rights in the exact way the Constitution directs it to.

To a generation beaten down by skyrocketing unemployment, plunging retirement savings, and mounting home foreclosures, 'Mad Men' offers the schadenfreude-filled message that their predecessors were equally unhappy - and that the bleakness meter in American life has always been set on high.

As much as possible, location-specific information should not be collected in the first place, or not in personally identifiable form.

The anti-New Deal line is wrong as a matter of economics. F.D.R.'s spending programs did help the economy and created millions of new jobs.

The remarkable thing about 'Avatar' is the degree to which the technology is integral to the story. It is important to show Pandora and its Na'Vi natives in 3-D because 'Avatar' is fundamentally about the moral necessity of seeing other beings fully.

When the government takes video of people in public places, the images should only be kept as long as they may reasonably be needed to investigate a crime. After a few days, if there has not been a report of a crime, they should be destroyed.

'Hard Times' does not romanticize the Depression, but at least a few of Mr. Terkel's subjects managed to find silver linings.

Vampires are sleek demons for good times. They suavely leech off society - like investment bankers who plunder outsize shares of deals for themselves or rapacious fund managers.

There is no actual need to tighten voter ID rules: there have been extraordinarily few instances of people committing fraud at the polls.

As self-driving cars become more common, there will be a flood of new legal questions.

The minimum wage can play a vital role in lifting hard-working families above the poverty line.

State assaults on the separation of church and state are nothing new.

Voter ID laws have a disproportionate impact on groups that lean democratic - including blacks, hispanics and students.

For people worried about the Great Recession and the uncertainty of what is coming next, the characters of 'Mad Men' are good company.

The civil rights and antiwar movements taught Americans to question authority.

There was a rule, back when I was an education lawyer in Alabama, about visiting public schools: always go on a rainy day so you can see how badly the roofs leak.

In the James Cameron blockbuster 'Avatar,' 3-D cinematography is the real star. The bugs and crawling creatures seem to slither into the theater seats. The floating mountains of the planet Pandora hover gloriously overhead. And the Na'Vi, Pandora's 10-foot-tall, blue-skinned natives, come convincingly to life.

Escapism makes a lot of intuitive sense - whisk people away from their cares with stories of a better life.

Republicans and blacks had an unlikely alliance around 'max black' after the 1990 census. By concentrating black voters in some districts, the strategy elected a record number of black congressmen in 1992. But the remaining 'bleached' districts were more likely to elect white Republicans.

The worst excesses of the dot-com era are gone.

Anti-New Deal rhetoric has never disappeared from American political life.

A Reagan appointee, Justice Kennedy is no liberal, as he has shown on issues from affirmative action to corporate campaign spending. But he has repeatedly sided with gay litigants before the court.

A publicly run health care program could compete with private insurance companies, which have a record of overcharging and underperforming.

Conservatives like to insist that their judges are strict constructionists, giving the Constitution and statutes their precise meaning and no more, while judges like Ms. Sotomayor are activists. But there is no magic right way to interpret terms like 'free speech' or 'due process' - or potato chip.

The whole New Deal was in a sense just a series of public options, some more optional than others, that offered government as an alternative to the often-flawed private market.

Law graduates have always ended up in business, government, journalism and other fields. Law schools could do more to build these subjects into their coursework.

One way to reduce the need for layoffs would be to cut back on hours, spreading the available work among more employees.

The blogosphere makes it possible to have a sprawling national conversation about the hard times - often among people who would never find each other offline.

Mississippi's loose campaign finance laws allow lawyers and companies to contribute heavily to the judges they appear before. That is terrible for justice, since the courts are teeming with perfectly legal conflicts of interest.

Patents have a place in medical science - for new inventions that advance the state of knowledge.

Being unemployed - or working at minimum wage - is rough in the best of circumstances.

In a perfect world, we would have put users in control of their information when the Internet was first created.

A little-appreciated downside of the technology revolution is that, mainly without thinking about it, we have given up 'locational privacy.'

Liberal judges tend to be expansive about things like equal protection, while conservatives read more into ones like 'the right to bear arms.'

Age discrimination is illegal. But when compared with discrimination against racial minorities and women, it is a second-class civil rights issue.

It is hard to imagine an area in which Congress has more express constitutional authority to act than in protecting the right of minorities to vote.

Social Security, all public and no option, rescued older Americans from living their final years in poverty.

The first thing to understand about surveillance video in public places is that there is already a lot of it going on - though it is impossible to know how much.

Amazon is holding its own because the service it provides - offering millions of books and other items quickly and easily from home at any hour of the day or night - is a real one, and one that was impossible before there was an Internet.

It was not until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s that Congress got serious about the assignment laid out in the post-Civil War amendments.

When tulip mania dies down, all that remains are pretty flowers. When bubbles burst, nothing is left but soapy residue. But the Internet revolution, for all its speculative excesses, really is changing the world.

Our movements reveal a great deal about who we are. A record of our locations over time can reveal whether we go to tent revivals or radical political meetings, abortion clinics or AIDS doctors.

In zombie horror, the juxtaposition of the calm world of the living and the menace of the undead inspires terror. In zombie comedy, like 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,' it is played for laughs.

People's genes can say a great deal about their health. There are genes that reveal an increased likelihood of getting cancer, heart disease or Alzheimer's.

There is something not entirely satisfying about an online memorial.