I would say the discovery of the hydrothermal vents off the Galápagos Islands. That really turned science upside down. Until that time, there were a lot of things we didn’t know about the ocean. We didn’t know why it was salty. We didn’t know why it had the chemistry that it had.

Obviously having my family and being able to hold my kids a month ago with that Super Bowl trophy was one that you'll always remember.

I’m proud any time that I see a toxic chemical process, something that produces toxic waste or requires precious metals, which have to be mined at terrible environmental degradation costs — I’m proud when I see that replaced with a clean, efficient biological process that doesn’t produce those things. And we have to do that a million times over in order to move away from our addiction to this old-fashioned chemistry that we do.

I think that cases are, in some senses, are a little like children. I have six children. It’s hard to say which one I’m most proud of. But I think that certainly the marriage equality cases are cases that I am enormously proud of. I think that we have in those cases contributed to a really important change in this country. The cases that I’ve done in the area of racial equality as a young lawyer working in Mississippi, and then later on I successfully sued the Republican National Committee on behalf of the Democratic National Committee in 1986, I think it was, to stop the RNC from targeting black and minority districts with voter ID, voter security kinds of tactics. That litigation I’m pretty proud of.

My father was my major teacher, disciplinarian. But my mother lent a lot to me and to my life, in that, when things weren’t going right, or when my father was too tough, I had the soft feel of my mother to help me, and she did. And she a lot of the times gave me confidence that I needed to overcome some of the things that happened that weren’t so pleasant.