Alan Dershowitz

Alan Morton Dershowitz (born September 1, 1938) is a lawyer and jurist from the United States. He has spent most of his career at Harvard Law School, where at the age of 28 he became the youngest full professor in the law school's history, and is now the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law. In addition to his teaching, Dershowitz is a prolific author who makes frequent media and public speaking appearances and has worked on a number of high-profile legal cases.

As a criminal appellate lawyer Dershowitz successfully argued to overturn the conviction of Claus von Bülow for the attempted murder of his wife. The publicity surrounding this New York society scandal fueled enough interest that Dershowitz's book on the case, Reversal of Fortune, was turned into a film starring Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close. In addition, Dershowitz has often commented on Judaism, Israel, civil rights and liberties, and the First Amendment.

Early life, education, and family

Dershowitz was born in the Williamsburg neighborhood in the New York City borough of Brooklyn and grew up in Borough Park.

His parents, Harry and Claire, were both devout Orthodox Jews. Harry Dershowitz (May 8, 1909–April 26, 1984) was a founder and president of the Young Israel Synagogue in the 1960s, served on the board of directors of the Etz Chaim School in Borough Park, and in retirement was co-owner of the Manhattan-based Merit Sales Company. Dershowitz's brother Nathan is counsel for the American Jewish Congress.

Dershowitz attended Yeshiva University High School, where he played on the basketball team. He was a rebellious student, often criticized by his teachers. The school's career placement center, however, told him that he had talent and was capable of becoming an advertising executive, funeral director, or salesman. He decided, he said, to do something that "requires a big mouth and no brain...so I became a lawyer."

Upon graduating, he attended Brooklyn College and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1959. He later attended Yale Law School, where he was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. He graduated first in his class with a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) in 1962.

Career

After being admitted to the bar, Dershowitz served as a law clerk for David L. Bazelon, Chief Judge of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and Arthur Goldberg, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

He joined the faculty of Harvard Law School as an assistant professor of law in 1964. He was made a full professor of law in 1967 at the age of 28, becoming Harvard's youngest full law professor in the law school's history. He was appointed the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law in 1993, succeeding Abram Chayes.

Much of Dershowitz's legal career has focused on criminal law, and his clients have included high-profile figures such as Patricia Hearst, Leona Helmsley, Jim Bakker, Mike Tyson, O.J. Simpson, and Harry Reems.

While representing Claus von Bülow he had the case overturned on appeal; in a retrial, von Bülow was acquitted. Afterwards, Dershowitz told the story of the case in his book, Reversal of Fortune. In the movie version, Dershowitz was played by Ron Silver, and Dershowitz himself had a cameo as a judge.

For several years, Dershowitz has written the monthly column "Justice" in the pages of Penthouse Magazine. Attorney General's Commission on Pornography (1986) Photographs, from Porn Report, accessed April 12, 2006

Recognition

Dershowitz was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1979, and was in 1983 a recipient of the William O. Douglas First Amendment Award from the Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai Brith for his work in civil rights. He has been awarded honorary doctorates in law from Yeshiva University, the Hebrew Union College, Monmouth College, Haifa University and Bar-Ilan University.

He has been described by Newsweek as America's "most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer and one of its most distinguished defenders of individual rights" ^*, and by Corriere della Sera as "America's most famous progressive lawyer".

He has been referenced on several occasions in popular entertainment, especially during the O.J. Simpson trial. On television, he has been parodied on Saturday Night Live and mentioned in the episode "Homer Bad Man" of The Simpsons.

Views and positions

Dershowitz has taken public stances on a number of controversial contemporary issues. Because of his fame, his positions have often been covered by major media sources and have been the subject of attention from both scholarly and political points of view.

Torture warrants

Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, Dershowitz advocated the issuance of warrants allowing terrorism suspects to be tortured if there is an "absolute need to obtain immediate information in order to save lives coupled with probable cause that the suspect had such information and is unwilling to reveal it".

Although he claims to be personally against the use of torture, he believes that authorities should be permitted to use non-lethal torture in a "ticking bomb" scenario, regardless of whether international law permits it, and that it would be less destructive to the rule of law to regulate the process than to leave it up to the discretion of individual law-enforcement agents. Under his proposal, the government would not be allowed to prosecute the torture subject based upon information revealed under that interrogation method. "If torture is going to be administered as a last resort in the ticking-bomb case, to save enormous numbers of lives, it ought to be done openly, with accountability, with approval by the president of the United States or by a Supreme Court justice".

Some civil libertarians have criticized Dershowitz's solution to the problem presented by uncooperative captured terrorists. Harvey Silverglate states that jury nullification and executive clemency could protect law enforcement in the hypothetical ticking-bomb case, thus "our legal system is perfectly capable of dealing with the exceptional hard case without enshrining the notion that it is okay to torture a fellow human being".

William F. Schulz, the executive director of the U.S. section of Amnesty International, states that Dershowitz's hypothetical ticking-bomb scenario is unrealistic, because it would require that "the authorities know that a bomb has been planted somewhere; know it is about to go off; know that the suspect in their custody has the information they need to stop it; know that the suspect will yield that information accurately in a matter of minutes if subjected to torture; and know that there is no other way to obtain it." He also states that employing authorized torture would lower the country's ability to stand up for human rights abroad.

Bill Goodman of the Center for Constitutional Rights, debating with Dershowitz on CNN, stated that Dershowitz's proposal would create a "very slippery slope," and that torture would "happen under more than those exceptional circumstances. It's going to start becoming the regular, rather than the unusual".

The debate with Finkelstein

Shortly after the publication of Dershowitz's book The Case for Israel, Norman Finkelstein accused Dershowitz, of "fraud, falsification, plagiarism and nonsense." Saying that Dershowitz lacked knowledge about specific contents of his own book during a radio debate, Finkelstein also claimed that Dershowitz could not have written the book, and may not have even read it.^* Finkelstein later expanded on his charges in a book, Beyond Chutzpah. The book also contains chapters contrasting Dershowitz's arguments in The Case for Israel with the views of some human rights organizations, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

Dershowitz asked Harvard to investigate the charge of plagiarism and was exonerated. Dershowitz and some prominent supporters say that Finkelstein is simply accusing him of good scholarly practice: citing references he learned of in Peters' book after first consulting them.^*

Dershowitz responded to Finkelstein's charges at length in chapter 16 of his 2005 The Case for Peace. In that chapter, titled "A Case Study in Hate and Intimidation," Dershowitz alleges that the plagiarism charges are the latest manifestation of an ongoing conspiracy masterminded by Noam Chomsky, who "selects the target and directs Finkelstein to probe the writings in minute detail and conclude that the writer didn't actually write the work." In the process, according to Dershowitz, Finkelstein "makes up quotes" in order to defame the victim selected by Chomsky.

The chapter's epigraph is a quotation, attributed to Chomsky, arguing that "Jews do not merit a 'second homeland' because they already have New York, with a huge Jewish population, Jewish-run media, a Jewish mayor, and a domination of cultural and economic life."reductio ad absurdum: responding to a New York Times op-ed which had argued in parallel terms that the Palestinians didn't merit "another Palestinian state, in addition to Jordan," "The Middle East Lie," by A.M. Rosenthal, New York Times, March 21 1989 Chomsky wrote, "We might ask how the Times would react to an Arab claim that the Jews do not merit a 'second homeland' because they already have New York," etc. Lies of Our Times, January 1 1990 In The Case for Peace, Dershowitz excised the first thirteen words from Chomsky's formulation, making the sentence appear to advance a line of reasoning that it in fact holds up for ridicule. The doctored quotation is attributed to Chomsky without explanation. [http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/dershowitz/Chapter_16.pdf" target="_blank" >^* See also: Norman Finkelstein, Dershowitz-Finkelstein affair.

Mearsheimer and Walt Paper

University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt of Harvard, both political scientists, published in March 2006 a paper which criticizes what they describe as the "Israel Lobby" for influencing U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East away from U.S. interests and towards Israel's interests. Mearsheimer and Walt describe Dershowitz in the paper as an “apologist” for the Israel lobby. Dershowitz in turn described Walt and Mearsheimer as “liars” and “bigots,”and suggested the paper was plagiarized from various hate sites: “every paragraph virtually is copied from a neo-Nazi Web site, from a radical Islamic Web site, from David Duke’s Web site.”Dershowitz, Alan A reply to the Mearsheimer Walt "Working Paper", April 6, 2006. Accessed April 6, 2006. Mearsheimer and Walt responded in the London Review of Books to Dershowitz's contention that they used racist sources for their article: "Dershowitz offers no evidence to support this false claim."^*" target="_blank" >In reference to the movement to divest from Israel, the Harvard Crimson quoted Dershowitz as telling students “Your House master is a bigot and you ought to know that. Everyone else who signed that petition is also a bigot.” [http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=254491

Bulger controversies

During the time period that former Massachusetts Senate President Billy Bulger still held office (and afterwards), Alan Dershowitz was well known for his pointed criticisms of Bulger. ^* While Bulger held office, he was by many accounts the most powerful politician in Massachusetts and Dershowitz was one of his highest profile critics.

In 1990, Dershowitz sued the Boston Globe regarding an alleged quote that Mike Barnicle had attributed to him and won a $75,000 in an out-of-court settlement. ^* The ombudsman for the Globe sided with Dershowitz and questioned Barnicle's credibility.

Selected bibliography

2006: Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways (Issues of Our Time) (ISBN 0393060128)
2005: The Case for Peace: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Can be Resolved (ISBN 0471743178); Chapter 16 is available online in PDF format
2004: Rights From Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights (ISBN 0465017134)
2004: America on Trial: Inside the Legal Battles That Transformed Our Nation (ISBN 0446520586)
2003: America Declares Independence (ISBN 0471264822)
2003: The Case for Israel (hardcover: ISBN 047146502X; paperback: ISBN 0471679526)
2002: Shouting Fire: Civil Liberties in a Turbulent Age (ISBN 0316181412)
2002: Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge (ISBN 0300097662)
2001: Supreme Injustice: How the High Court Hijacked Election 2000 (ISBN 0195148274)
2001: Letters to a Young Lawyer (ISBN 0465016316)
2000: The Genesis of Justice: Ten Stories of Biblical Injustice that Led to the Ten Commandments and Modern Law (ISBN 0446676772)
1999: Just Revenge (fiction; ISBN 0446608718)
1998: Sexual McCarthyism: Clinton, Starr, and the Emerging Constitutional Crisis (ISBN 0465016286)
1997: The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century (ISBN 0316181331)
1996: Reasonable Doubts: The Criminal Justice System and the O.J. Simpson Case (ISBN 0684830213)
1994: The Abuse Excuse: And Other Cop-Outs, Sob Stories, and Evasions of Responsibility (ISBN 0316181358)
1994: The Advocate's Devil (fiction; ISBN 0446517593)
1992: Contrary to Popular Opinion (ISBN 0886877016)
1991: Chutzpah (ISBN 0316181374)
1988: Taking Liberties: A Decade of Hard Cases, Bad Laws, and Bum Raps (ISBN 0809246163)
1985: Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bülow Case (ISBN 0394539036)
1982: The Best Defense (ISBN 0394507363)

References

Articles about Dershowitz

Bernard J. Shapiro (2003). "Book review: The Case for Israel, by Alan M. Dershowitz". The Maccabean Online, September 2003. Freeman Center for Strategic Studies.
Michael Beshara (2002). "Dershowitz defends Israel at talk: Professor condemns U.S. divestiture program". Ultra Vires, The Independent Student Newspaper of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, November 2002.
Vicki Haddock (2001). "The Unspeakable: To get at the truth, is torture or coercion ever justified?". San Francisco Chronicle, November 18, 2001.
"Ask Amnesty: Torture". Amnesty International USA, December 2001.
Regan Boychuk (2005). "The case against Alan Dershowitz: Public Committee Against Torture in Israel vs. Dershowitz". ZNet, April 15, 2001. (Alternate URL)

The debate with Noam Chomsky

Alan M. Dershowitz (2002). "Chomsky's immoral divestiture petition". The Tech 122(25). May 10, 2002.
Noam Chomsky debates Alan Dershowitz at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, November 29 2005. (Real Player video|transcript)
Interviews of Noam Chomsky by David Barsamian (Chomsky "versus" Dershowitz, bottom of page) ^* October 24 1986

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