BURNS What else is in that list of tests, besides, just, ‘will it help actual people’?

HARRIS What else is in that test? How long will it take? Right? There’s a speech I gave at Berkeley, at Boalt Hall — they renamed Boalt Hall, Berkeley Law School, the University of California, Berkeley, Law School. And I like to write my commencement speeches, but this one was on the heels of the battle we had with the banks around the foreclosure crisis, so it was really basic. I gave this speech that was like: So, you want to be a lawyer, here’s what you gotta do, you have to embrace the mundane. It was awful. Meaning, I wasn’t up here, I was like: You’ve got to embrace the mundane, you might have to stand at that Xerox machine copying, you might have to go through 500 cases to find that piece of precedent. And the parents are all like, oh, this is good. The students are like, yikes, right?

And then part of how I talked about it is I used Brown v. Board of Education as an example. So Brown v. Board of Education, to get to that decision, Thurgood Marshall and all those lawyers had to, as with so many seminal civil rights cases and the leaders who got it there, had to have the patience with the — so, I talk about the significance of the passage of time. The significance of the passage of time.

[Here’s what to watch for in Wednesday night’s debate.]

So, using Brown v. Board of Education as an example of this, the significance of the passage of time is that all those who knew the importance of getting that case there had to be patient, to some extent, with the passage of time, knowing that they had to build up precedent. But there is significance to the passage of time, right? The significance there being the need to build up precedent. So then, Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954, I believe May of 1954, and everyone is sitting around — this is my interpretation of what happened — ‘cha-ching, cha-ching,’ you know, their glasses of chardonnay and champagne. ‘Oh, this is lovely and wonderful, we won.’

And then the way I tell the story is, but not until almost 20 years later did it hit the streets of Berkeley, California. So then the significance of the passage of time is about, and I said this when I argued the Prop 8 case about same-sex marriage: Every day in the life of someone who is being denied justice is a very long time. So then — right? Again, the point there being, the significance of the passage of time. So part of how I think about policy is also through that lens. How long will it take us to get where we need to go, and what will be the cost-benefit of the significance of the passage of time? I guess that’s it.

I thought about it when we were battling the banks around the foreclosure crisis. I’m going to tell you, that was one of the most difficult professional and personal experiences that I’ve had. Because part of it on this point, specifically, was that I knew if — and then when — I pulled California out of those negotiations, I knew that every day that we did not have a deal was a day that people would lose their homes, in real time. The way I used to talk about it is that there are people barely holding on with their fingernails, to their homes. And the issue there was that that deal would have helped me save — if I remember the numbers correctly — about 40,000, versus what I knew the settlement actually should be, that would have been a lot more. But again, it’s the significance of the passage of time. And maybe my orientation comes, again, I’ll repeat, from being an executive and knowing that the decisions that I make are decisions that actually will have — will actually happen — as opposed to me writing an article or writing a book. And that’s where, maybe, that’s also my orientation about how I think about policy, then, as it relates to my team or what we talk about. Which is, I intend that whatever we say is going to happen actually happens.

BURNS Does that observation, about how long it takes for anything to actually happen — does that reflect any kind of underlying — pessimism might be too strong a word, but — about the ability of the government to create sweeping social transformation?

HARRIS Well, it depends how you define that and what’s at stake. But I do get frustrated. I certainly get frustrated by the bureaucracy of government and, you know, I say this as a devout public servant, right? Which is, I know government from the inside out, and I know government at a local level, at a state level and a federal level, from the inside out.