David French

That's all the courts can do.

They cannot save us.

You know, it's funny.

Let me cheat a little bit.

Let me cheat a little bit because... Like lawyers.

Yeah, like we'll do.

I'm going to use exploit every loophole to change the question.

So I have been thinking a lot about the civil rights movement over the course of the last several years because I feel like...

as people were in the civil rights movement, you're living through a moment in time where your grandchildren will be looking and asking, what did you do then?

What was it like then and what did you do then?

And I think we often think a lot about the heroes of the civil rights movement, like a Martin Luther King and how they had such an incredible political and cultural influence.

But I also think we need to really be looking right now at the lawyers of the civil rights movement and the way in which they very courageously and also shrewdly stood up for people who are among the most marginalized in the country in legal systems that were far less functional than ours.

And we raised our kids in a town in Tennessee called Columbia, Tennessee.

It's a relatively small town about an hour south of Nashville.

And Thurgood Marshall is part of the story of Columbia, Tennessee, because he came there at some of the darkest times in the civil rights movement to represent some embattled defendants in that little town.

And what is so compelling to me about that narrative and about that story is he's willing to go anywhere

into any place with any degree of danger to stand for justice.

And that's when you think about a lawyer, you cannot think about a good lawyer

without thinking of both intellect and moral courage.

And so when I'm thinking about the law and when I'm looking for the people I'm gonna look up to in the law, I'm not just looking at intellect, I'm looking at moral courage.