==On his sports background:
Cossack: "Having gone to UCLA, I bleed blue and gold (he says as he shows his tie with blue and gold stripes). I'm a big basketball and football fan. Growing up here, I'm a Dodger fan, but I'm a huge Red Sox fan. I think with Boston it's OK to be a fan in the 21st century. Before that it was a disease I passed onto my son. There was something wonderfully tragic about being a Red Sox fan, but now my grandson won't have that. The one thing ESPN gets me for is the 'College GamePlan' on Saturdays so I can watch UCLA football (when living back in Washington D.C.) and the MLB package so I can watch my Red Sox."

==On making the change from lawyer to TV talking legal guy:
Cossack: "I was out here (in L.A.) almost my whole life until 1994, and I moved to Washington to start 'Burden of Proof' in 1995. In some ways, it was an unsettled time in my life. My wife had passed away (in '91) and I was looking for something different. I never thought I'd be a resident of Washington D.C. 15 years later. When they asked me to do this TV program (with Greta van Susteren for CNN), I really felt it would last six months. Who wants to watch two lawyers talking to each other? How dull. But 'Burden of Proof' was very popular, and it didn't end because of bad ratings, it was simply that, after 9/11, the state department would put their daily briefing on at the same time we'd be on the air, so we were always getting pre-empted. Greta ended up wanting to go to Fox; I didn't. So it ended after seven years. I didn't know what else I was going to do. I had a law degree. I could go back into legal practice. But then I got a call from ESPN."

==On how he had to approach going on the air to talk about Kobe Bryant's case in July, 2003:
Cossack: "I had to answer a lot of interesting questions, many that were technical. The one major issue was the rape shield law in Colorado, which says a women’s prior sexual history is irrelevant in court in a rape case. That wasn’t always the law. Most modern thinking is, because she said yes before, it doesn't mean she said yes to this guy. So Kobe Bryant was back and forth from here to Colorado two or three times a week. A great part of his case was whether the shield law applied because his defense team was very good. There was a claim that the woman had injuries that came from this attack, and Kobe's team wanted to put her prior sexual history on trial, to show she was with other men and those alleged injuries could have come from someone else. That's technical, legal stuff, but that's what we discussed when the 'SportsCenter' anchor would ask, 'So, what's going on in court today? So then I take something like that, get it to 2 minutes and make it understandable.
"By the time I got to ESPN, I'd been talking law on TV for eight years. It's the same law, it's just that its sports-related. Now, sometimes I'll get asked about anti-trust, and I cringe a little inside and say, 'I wish knew more,' but for the purposes of talking on TV, I know enough."

==On the subject matter covered in his Media and the Law class at Pepperdine: Cossack: "It's really all about First Amendment issues, and how cases decided 40 years ago, there was never consideration for what we have now in the communications business today. It has so radically changed in the last 10 years. Way back when, there were only three major networks and everyone read a morning and evening newspaper. Sadly for me, newspaper readership is dying. I know I'm supposed to go to the Internet now and read, but that doesn't work for me. I want to hold it. I can't sit in bed on a Sunday morning and read the computer.

"So, we're in a much different place today. At least I am with my students. That's fine. But the beautiful thing about teaching is occasionally they'll give you a glimpse of the world through their eyes. It's like the Springsteen song, lasting in the blink of a young girl's eye. Just for that mili-second, I get to see life as a young person living in the age of email, YouTube and communications applications that allow them to talk with young people all over the world. I, like most of us over the age of 30, have no idea of what their world is like, and should not know. But how exciting it is for me to get that blink of a view every now and then. Talk about magic."

==More on how teaching college students about media law relates to teaching TV viewers about court proceedings involving athletes:
Cossack: "As a legal analyst for ESPN, I think my job is to describe what viewers are sometimes seeing or what I saw or what someone has just said and explain what it means in language that is understandable. That does not mean dumming down, but what it does mean is explaining in an understandable way what has occurred, why, what it means, and what it means for the future. I recognize that the vast majority of my viewers are not lawyers. Often times they have had not experience with the law other than legal TV shows and my job is to educate them about what are the legal implications of a particular story that has arisen from a sports fact situation.
"Remember, the law is mostly the same whether the facts are sports oriented or not. I spent seven years with CNN talking daily about all kinds of legal situations and before that was a trial lawyer speaking to juries for a number of years. If I have any gift its that I think I can explain the law to non-lawyers in a way that is interesting and understandable.
"Teaching is similar in this way. I believe that to be a good instructor of law, I must not only tell the students what the law is but explain to them why it is that way, all in a hopefully interesting way. In my class, I ask the students not only to think about what the law is, but what the law will be. We are in an exploding time for communications. Every day brings news of another way that consumers can get hooked together with another new product that was unheard of yesterday.
"So, my job is to get them to think about the future with a nod to the past. I try and accomplish this in many of the same ways that I speak on TV. Obviously, my students are law students are more sophisticated then my usual audience but I try and bring the subjects we discuss alive by talking about the history of what we are discussing, how it got to where it is, and some speculation about the future."

==On what it's like to be known as a person on "SportsCenter" when he's actually argued a case on the floor of the U.S. Supreme Court:
Cossack: "I am proud that I did get to argue before the Court, however, I think it is something that perhaps thousands of lawyers have done and it really is a professional and, in some ways very personal accomplishment I get a great deal of props from other lawyers for it, but in terms of who knows and who should know, outside of my family, I think there is a great gap. I remember the day vividly. I think I have never been as scared.
"In the law biz, we are taught to remember the cases that the Supreme Court decides, very rarely do we remember the lawyers who argued them. 'SportsCenter' is an entirely different event. Hugely popular, well produced, engaging anchors and specific topics that attract millions of viewers. I think 'SportsCenter' has become what the nightly news with Walter Cronkite used to be ... the place sports fans go to get answers to sports questions.
"Is it the same as arguing before the Supreme Court? Well, no. Scratch me and I'm still a lawyer But it's a great opportunity for me, something that I truly enjoy doing and the only thing that has topped it with my son is the one time I was interviewed during the half on 'Monday Night Football'."