Alan Morton Dershowitz is an American lawyer, jurist, and political commentator. He has spent most of his career at
Harvard Law SchoolHarvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...
where in 1967, at the age of 28, he became the youngest full professor of law in its history. He has held the Felix Frankfurter professorship there since 1993.
Dershowitz is known for his involvement in several high-profile legal cases and as a commentator on the
Arab–Israeli conflictThe Arab–Israeli conflict refers to political tensions and open hostilities between the Arab peoples and the Jewish community of the Middle East. The modern Arab-Israeli conflict began with the rise of Zionism and Arab Nationalism towards the end of the nineteenth century, and intensified with the...
. As a
criminalCriminal law, is the body of law that relates to crime. It might be defined as the body of rules that defines conduct that is not allowed because it is held to threaten, harm or endanger the safety and welfare of people, and that sets out the punishment to be imposed on people who do not obey...
appellate lawyer, he has won 13 of the 15 murder and attempted murder cases he has handled, and has represented a series of celebrity clients, including
Mike TysonMichael Gerard "Mike" Tyson is a retired American boxer. Tyson is a former undisputed heavyweight champion of the world and holds the record as the youngest boxer to win the WBC, WBA and IBF world heavyweight titles, he was 20 years, 4 months and 22 days old...
,
Patty HearstPatricia Campbell Hearst , now known as Patricia Campbell Hearst Shaw, is an American newspaper heiress, socialite, actress, kidnap victim, and convicted bank robber....
, and
Jim BakkerJames Orsen "Jim" Bakker is an American televangelist, a former Assemblies of God minister, and a former host of The PTL Club, a popular evangelical Christian television program.A sex scandal led to his resignation from the ministry...
. His most notable cases include his role in 1984 in overturning the conviction of
Claus von BülowClaus von Bülow is a British socialite of German and Danish ancestry. He was accused of the attempted murder of his wife Sunny von Bülow by administering an insulin overdose in 1980 but his conviction in the first trial was reversed and he was found not guilty in both his retrials.-Biography:Born...
for the attempted murder of his wife,
SunnyMartha Sharp Crawford von Bülow , known as Sunny von Bülow, was an American heiress and socialite. Her husband, Claus von Bülow, was convicted of attempting her murder by insulin overdose, but the conviction was overturned on appeal...
, and as the appellate adviser for the defense in the O.J. Simpson trial in 1995.
A political liberal, he is the author of a number of books about politics and law, including
Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bülow Case (1985), the basis of
the 1990 filmReversal of Fortune is a 1990 film adapted from the 1985 book Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bülow Case, written by law professor Alan Dershowitz...
;
Chutzpah (1991);
Reasonable Doubts: The Criminal Justice System and the O.J. Simpson Case (1996);
The Case for IsraelThe Case for Israel is a New York Times bestseller by Alan Dershowitz, a law professor at Harvard University. The book responds to common criticisms of Israel....
(2003);
Rights From Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights (2004) and
The Case for PeaceThe Case for Peace: How The Arab–Israeli Conflict Can Be Resolved is the sequel to The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz.-Summary:Dershowitz was originally planning to write The Case Against Israel's Enemies, however, after the death of Yasser Arafat the author chose to focus on more positive and...
(2005).
Early life
Dershowitz was born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to Harry and Claire Dershowitz, an
Orthodox JewishOrthodox Judaism , is the approach to Judaism which adheres to the traditional interpretation and application of the laws and ethics of the Torah as legislated in the Talmudic texts by the Sanhedrin and subsequently developed and applied by the later authorities known as the Gaonim, Rishonim, and...
couple, and was raised in Borough Park. His father 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. According to Dershowitz, Harry had a strong sense of justice and talked about how it was "the Jew's job to defend the underdog."
Dershowitz's first job was at a deli factory on Manhattan's Lower East Side in 1952, at age 14. He recalls tying the strings that separated the hot dogs and once getting locked in the freezer. He attended
Yeshiva University High SchoolThe Marsha Stern Talmudical Academy, also known as Yeshiva University High School for Boys , MTA or TMSTA , is an Orthodox Jewish day school , the boys' high school of Yeshiva University in the Washington Heights neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan.-History:The Talmudical...
, where he played on the basketball team. He was a rebellious student, often criticized by his teachers. The school's career placement center told him he had talent and was capable of becoming an advertising executive, funeral director, or salesman. He later said his teachers told him to do something that "requires a big mouth and no brain ... so I became a lawyer." After graduating from high school, he attended
Brooklyn CollegeBrooklyn College is a senior college of the City University of New York, located in Brooklyn, New York, United States.Established in 1930 by the New York City Board of Higher Education, the College had its beginnings as the Downtown Brooklyn branches of Hunter College and the City College of New...
and received his A.B. in 1959. Next he attended
Yale Law SchoolYale Law School, or YLS, is the law school of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Established in 1824, it offers the J.D., LL.M., J.S.D. and M.S.L. degrees in law. It also hosts visiting scholars, visiting researchers and a number of legal research centers...
, where he was editor-in-chief of the
Yale Law JournalThe Yale Law Journal is a student-run law review affiliated with the Yale Law School. Published continuously since 1891, it is the most widely known of the eight law reviews published by students at Yale Law School...
, and graduated first in his class with a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) in 1962. He has been a member of a Conservative
minyanA minyan in Judaism refers to the quorum of ten Jewish adults required for certain religious obligations. According to many non-Orthodox streams of Judaism adult females count in the minyan....
at Harvard Hillel, but is now a secular Jew. He is married to Carolyn Cohen and has three children.
Career
After being admitted to
the barAn admission to practice law, also called admission to the bar, is acquired when a lawyer receives a license to practice law. Becoming a lawyer is a widely varied process around the world. Common to all jurisdictions are requirements of age and competence; some jurisdictions also require citizenship...
, Dershowitz served as a clerk for
David L. BazelonDavid Lionel Bazelon was a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.-Early life, education, and career:...
, the chief judge of the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia CircuitThe United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit known informally as the D.C. Circuit, is the federal appellate court for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Appeals from the D.C. Circuit, as with all the U.S. Courts of Appeals, are heard on a...
. He said that "Bazelon was my best and worst boss at once ... He worked me to the bone; he didn't hesitate to call at 2 a.m. He taught me everything—how to be a civil libertarian, a Jewish activist, a mensch. He was halfway between a slave master and a father figure." During the 1963–1964 term, he served as
law clerk for the Supreme Court Associate Justice
Arthur GoldbergArthur Joseph Goldberg was an American statesman and jurist who served as the U.S. Secretary of Labor, Supreme Court Justice and Ambassador to the United Nations.-Early life:...
. He told Tom Van Riper of
Forbes that getting a Supreme Court clerkship was probably his second big break; his first was when, at age 14 or 15, a camp counselor told him he was smart but that his mind operated a little differently. He joined the faculty of Harvard Law School as an assistant professor in 1964, and was made a full professor in 1967 at the age of 28, at that time the youngest full professor of law in the school's history. He was appointed Felix Frankfurter professor of law in 1993.
Much of his legal career has focused on criminal law, and his clients have included high-profile figures such as Patty Hearst,
Harry ReemsHarry Reems is the nom de film of one of the most notorious pornographic actors of the 1970s and star of the 1972 cult classic Deep Throat.-Early life and career:Reems was born Herbert Streicher...
,
Leona HelmsleyLeona Mindy Roberts Helmsley was an American businesswoman and real estate entrepreneur. She was a flamboyant personality and had a reputation for tyrannical behavior that earned her the nickname Queen of Mean...
, Jim Bakker,
Mike TysonMichael Gerard "Mike" Tyson is a retired American boxer. Tyson is a former undisputed heavyweight champion of the world and holds the record as the youngest boxer to win the WBC, WBA and IBF world heavyweight titles, he was 20 years, 4 months and 22 days old...
,
Michael MilkenMichael Robert Milken is an American business magnate, financier, and philanthropist noted for his role in the development of the market for high-yield bonds during the 1970s and 1980s, for his 1990 guilty plea to felony charges for violating US securities laws, and for his funding of medical...
, O.J. Simpson and
Kirtanananda SwamiKirtanananda Swami, also known as Swami Bhaktipada was the highly-controversial charismatic Hare Krishna guru and co-founder of the New Vrindaban Hare Krishna community in Marshall County, West Virginia, where he served as spiritual leader for 26 years .-Early life:Kirtanananda was born Keith...
. He sees himself as a "lawyer of last resort"—someone to turn to when the defendant has few other legal options—and takes those cases that are what he calls "the most challenging, the most difficult and precedent-setting cases." He is currently advising
Julian AssangeJulian Paul Assange is an Australian publisher, journalist, writer, computer programmer and Internet activist. He is the editor in chief of WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website and conduit for worldwide news leaks with the stated purpose of creating open governments.WikiLeaks has published material...
's legal team.
Recognition
Dershowitz has been described by
Newsweek as America's "most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer and one of its most distinguished defenders of individual rights." He was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1979, and in 1983 received the
William O. DouglasWilliam Orville Douglas was an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. With a term lasting 36 years and 209 days, he is the longest-serving justice in the history of the Supreme Court...
First Amendment Award from the
Anti-Defamation LeagueThe Anti-Defamation League is an international non-governmental organization based in the United States. Describing itself as "the nation's premier civil rights/human relations agency", the ADL states that it "fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry, defends democratic ideals and protects...
for his work on civil rights. In November 2007, he was awarded the Soviet Jewry Freedom Award by the Russian Jewish Community Foundation. He has been awarded honorary doctorates in law from Yeshiva University, the Hebrew Union College, Monmouth University, University of Haifa, Syracuse University, Fitchburg State College, Bar-Ilan University, and Brooklyn College. In addition, he is a member of the International Advisory Board of
NGO MonitorNGO Monitor is a non-governmental organization based in Jerusalem, Israel whose stated aim is to generate and distribute critical analysis and reports on the output of the international NGO community for the benefit of government policy makers, journalists, philanthropic organizations and the...
.
Pornography (1976)
In 1976, Dershowitz handled the successful appeal of
Harry ReemsHarry Reems is the nom de film of one of the most notorious pornographic actors of the 1970s and star of the 1972 cult classic Deep Throat.-Early life and career:Reems was born Herbert Streicher...
, who had been convicted of distribution of obscenity resulting from his acting in the pornographic movie
Deep ThroatDeep Throat is a 1972 American pornographic film written and directed by Gerard Damiano and produced by Louis Peraino and starring Linda Lovelace ....
. In public debates, Dershowitz commonly argues against censorship of pornography on
First AmendmentThe First Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering...
grounds, and maintains that consumption of pornography is not harmful.
Claus von Bülow (1984)
Dershowitz represented
Claus von BülowClaus von Bülow is a British socialite of German and Danish ancestry. He was accused of the attempted murder of his wife Sunny von Bülow by administering an insulin overdose in 1980 but his conviction in the first trial was reversed and he was found not guilty in both his retrials.-Biography:Born...
, a British socialite, at appeal for the attempted murder of his wife,
Sunny von BülowMartha Sharp Crawford von Bülow , known as Sunny von Bülow, was an American heiress and socialite. Her husband, Claus von Bülow, was convicted of attempting her murder by insulin overdose, but the conviction was overturned on appeal...
, who died in 2008 after going into a coma in Newport, Rhode Island in 1980. He had the conviction overturned, and von Bülow was acquitted in a retrial. Dershowitz told the story of the case in his book,
Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bülow case (1985), which was turned into a movie in 1990. Dershowitz was played by actor
Ron SilverRonald Arthur "Ron" Silver was an American actor, director, producer, radio host and political activist.-Early life:...
, and Dershowitz himself had a cameo role as a judge.
Józef Glemp (1989)
In 1989, Dershowitz filed a defamation suit against Cardinal Józef Glemp, then Archbishop of Warsaw, on behalf of Rabbi
Avi WeissAvraham Weiss is an American Modern Orthodox rabbi who heads the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale in The Bronx, New York. He is an author, teacher, lecturer, and activist...
. Glemp had accused Weiss and six other New York Jews of attacking nuns at a much-disputed convent on the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Glemp's statement about Weiss, made in July 1989, was coupled with suggestions that Jews control the world's news media. Dershowitz's account of the lawsuit appears in his book
Chutzpah (1991).
Mike Barnicle (1990)
Dershowitz sued
The Boston Globe in 1990 over a remark reporter
Mike BarnicleMichael "Mike" Barnicle is an award-winning American print and broadcast journalist as well as a social and political commentator. He is a frequent contributor and occasional guest host on MSNBC's Morning Joe and Hardball with Chris Matthews and is frequently seen on NBC's Today Show with...
attributed to him, in which Dershowitz allegedly said he preferred Asian women because they are deferential to men. Dershowitz reportedly received a $75,000 out-of-court settlement and the newspaper's ombudsman questioned Barnicle's credibility, according to
The Boston Phoenix.
O.J. Simpson (1995)
Dershowitz acted as an appellate adviser to O.J. Simpson's defense team during the trial, and later wrote a book about it,
Reasonable Doubts: The Criminal Justice System and the O.J. Simpson Case (1996). He wrote: "the Simpson case will not be remembered in the next century. It will not rank as one of the trials of the century. It will not rank with the
Nuremberg trialsThe Nuremberg Trials were a series of military tribunals, held by the victorious Allied forces of World War II, most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of the defeated Nazi Germany....
, the
Rosenberg trialEthel Greenglass Rosenberg and Julius Rosenberg were American communists who were convicted and executed in 1953 for conspiracy to commit espionage during a time of war. The charges related to their passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union...
,
Sacco and VanzettiFerdinando Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were anarchists who were convicted of murdering two men during a 1920 armed robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts, United States...
. It is on par with
Leopold and LoebNathan Freudenthal Leopold, Jr. and Richard Albert Loeb , more commonly known as "Leopold and Loeb", were two wealthy University of Michigan alumni and University of Chicago students who murdered 14-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks in 1924 and were sentenced to life imprisonment.The duo were...
and the
LindberghThe kidnapping of Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., was the abduction of the son of aviator Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The toddler, 18 months old at the time, was abducted from his family home in East Amwell, New Jersey, near the town of Hopewell, New Jersey, on the evening of...
case, all involving celebrities. It is also not one of the most important cases of my own career. I would rank it somewhere in the middle in terms of interest and importance." The case has been described as the most publicized criminal trial in American history.
Jeffrey Epstein (2006)
Dershowitz provided legal assistance to friend and reported billionaire
Jeffrey EpsteinJeffrey Edward Epstein is an American financier. He served 13 months in jail of an 18-month sentence as a convicted sex offender in the state of Florida for soliciting an underage girl for prostitution...
, who was investigated following accusations that he had repeatedly solicited sex from minors. Dershowitz investigated some of Epstein's accusers and provided both the police and the State attorney’s office with a dossier containing information about their personal behavior, which had been obtained from their personal
MySpaceMyspace is a social networking service owned by Specific Media LLC and pop star Justin Timberlake. Myspace launched in August 2003 and is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. In August 2011, Myspace had 33.1 million unique U.S. visitors....
pages, including allegations of alcohol and drug use. Eventually, in 2008, Epstein plead guilty to a single state charge of soliciting prostitution and began serving an 18-month sentence.
On Israel
While Dershowitz is an outspoken supporter of Israel, Dershowitz self-identifies as "Pro-Israel and Pro-Palestine". Dershowitz engaged in highly publicized debates with a number of other commentators, including
Meir KahaneMartin David Kahane , also known as Meir Kahane , was an American-Israeli rabbi and ultra-nationalist writer and political figure. He was an ordained Orthodox rabbi and later served as a member of the Israeli Knesset...
,
Noam ChomskyAvram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
, and
Norman FinkelsteinNorman Gary Finkelstein is an American political scientist, activist and author. His primary fields of research are the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the politics of the Holocaust. He is a graduate of Binghamton University and received his Ph.D in Political Science from Princeton University...
. When former U.S. President Jimmy Carter had his book
Palestine: Peace Not ApartheidPalestine: Peace Not Apartheid is a New York Times Best Seller book written by Jimmy Carter, 39th President of the United States and winner of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize. It was published by Simon and Schuster in November 2006....
(2006) published—in which he argues that Israel's control of Palestinian land is the primary obstacle to peace—Dershowitz challenged Carter to a debate at Brandeis University. Carter declined, saying, "I don't want to have a conversation even indirectly with Dershowitz. There is no need to debate somebody who, in my opinion, knows nothing about the situation in Palestine." Carter did address Brandeis in January 2007, but only Brandeis students and staff were allowed to attend. Dershowitz was invited to respond on the same stage only after Carter had left.
He also took part in the
Doha DebatesThe Doha Debates are a forum for free speech in Qatar and tackle the region's most controversial and topical issues. They are sponsored by Qatar Foundation and their broadcasting rights are sold to BBC World News where they are aired monthly, eight times a year.In addition to BBC World News The...
at Georgetown University in April 2009, where he spoke against the motion "this House believes it's time for the US to get tough on Israel," with
Dore GoldDore Gold is an Israeli statesman who has served in various diplomatic positions under several Israeli governments. He is the current President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs...
, President of the
Jerusalem Center for Public AffairsThe Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs is a public policy think tank devoted to research and analysis of critical issues facing the Middle East. The center is located in Jerusalem, Israel...
. Speakers for the motion were
Avraham BurgAvraham "Avrum" Burg is an Israeli author; he was formerly a member of the Knesset, a chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel and a Speaker of the Knesset.-Biography:...
, former Chairman of the
Jewish Agency for IsraelThe Jewish Agency for Israel , also known as the Sochnut or JAFI, served as the organization in charge of immigration and absorption of Jews from the Diaspora into the state of Israel.-History:...
and former Speaker of the Knesset; and
Michael ScheuerMichael F. Scheuer is a former CIA intelligence officer, American blogger, historian, foreign policy critic, and political analyst. He is currently an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's Center for Peace and Security Studies...
, former Chief of the CIA
Bin Laden Issue StationThe Bin Laden Issue Station was a unit of the Central Intelligence Agency dedicated to tracking Osama bin Laden.Soon after its creation the Station developed a new, deadlier vision of bin Laden's activities. In 1999 the CIA inaugurated a grand "Plan" against al-Qaeda, but struggled to find the...
. Dershowitz's side lost the debate, with 63 percent of the audience voting for the motion.
Harvard-MIT divestment petition
Randall Adams of
The Harvard Crimson writes that, in the spring of 2002, a petition within Harvard calling for Harvard and MIT to divest from Israel and American companies that sell arms to Israel gathered over 600 signatures, including 74 from the Harvard faculty and 56 from the MIT faculty. Among the signatures was that of Harvard's Winthrop House Master Paul D. Hanson, in response to which Dershowitz staged a debate for 200 students in the Winthrop Junior Common Room. He called the petition's signatories antisemitic, bigots, and said they knew nothing about the Middle East. "Your House master is a bigot," he told the students, "and you ought to know that." Adams writes that Dershowitz cited examples of human rights violations in countries that the United States supports, such as the execution of homosexuals in Egypt and the repression of women in Saudi Arabia, and said he would sue any professor who voted against the tenure of another academic because of the candidate's position toward Israel, calling them "ignoramuses with Ph.D.s."
"New Response to Palestinian Terrorism" (2002)
In March 2002, Dershowitz published an article in
The Jerusalem Post entitled "New Response to Palestinian Terrorism." In it, he wrote that Israel should announce a unilateral cessation in retaliation, at the end of which it would "announce precisely what it will do in response to the next act of terrorism. For example, it could announce the first act of terrorism following the moratorium will result in the destruction of a small village which has been used as a base for terrorist operations. The residents would be given 24 hours to leave, and then troops will come in and bulldoze all of the buildings." The list of targets would be made public in advance. The proposal attracted criticism from within Harvard University and beyond.
James BamfordV. James Bamford is an American bestselling author and journalist who writes about United States intelligence agencies, most notably the National Security Agency.-Biography:...
argued in
The Washington Post that it would violate international law. Norman Finkelstein wrote that "it is hard to make out any difference between the policy Dershowitz advocates and the Nazi destruction of
LidiceLidice is a village in the Czech Republic just northwest of Prague. It is built on the site of a previous village of the same name which, as part of the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, was on orders from Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, completely destroyed by German forces in reprisal...
, for which he expresses abhorrence—except that Jews, not Germans, would be implementing it."
Norman Finkelstein
Shortly after the publication of Dershowitz's
The Case for IsraelThe Case for Israel is a New York Times bestseller by Alan Dershowitz, a law professor at Harvard University. The book responds to common criticisms of Israel....
(2003), Norman Finkelstein of DePaul University said the book contained plagiarism. He offered several examples, one of which was a quote from
Mark TwainSamuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...
appearing on pages 23–24 of
The Case for Israel, which he said was the same as one on pages 159–160 of
From Time ImmemorialFrom Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine is a 1984 book by Joan Peters about the demographics of the Arab population of Palestine and of the Jewish population of the Arab world before and after the formation of the State of Israel.According to the book a large...
by
Joan PetersJoan Peters is a former CBS news producer of otherwise unnamed documentaries, and the author best known for a number of theses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, put forward in her book From Time Immemorial, published in 1984 in which she claims that the Palestinians are largely not indigenous...
, including with the ellipses in the same place. Dershowitz said the quote was taken from Mark Twain, to whom he gave credit. Harvard's president,
Derek Bok, investigated the allegation and determined that no plagiarism had occurred.
In early 2004 it was announced that Dr Finkelstein would publish a study rebutting Professor Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel and documenting that extensive passages in his book had been plagiarized, Dershowitz and his attorneys entered into a protracted correspondence with the publisher, originally New Press and subsequently University of California Press also involving Governor Schwarzenegger.
Dershowitz had pressured the publishers suppressing the release of Beyond Chutzpah, yet refused to release his correspondence – indeed, falsely claiming that he had released it. Later in 2007 a California Public Records Act (CPRA) request was made to the University of California Press and the letters were released.
In October 2006, Dershowitz wrote to DePaul University faculty members to lobby against Finkelstein's application for tenure. The university's Liberal Arts and Sciences faculty voted to send a letter of complaint to Harvard University. In June 2007, DePaul University denied Finkelstein tenure.
Mearsheimer and Walt
In March 2006,
John MearsheimerJohn J. Mearsheimer is an American professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He is an international relations theorist. Known for his book on offensive realism, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, more recently Mearsheimer has attracted attention for co-authoring and publishing...
, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and
Stephen WaltStephen Martin Walt is a professor of international affairs at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Among his most prominent works are and . He coauthored The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy with John Mearsheimer.-Education and career:In 1983, he received a Ph.D. in...
, Professor of International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, co-wrote a paper entitled "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," published in
The London Review of Books. Mearsheimer and Walt criticized what they described as "the Israel lobby" for influencing U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East in a direction away from U.S. interests and toward Israel's interests. They referred to Dershowitz specifically as an "apologist" for the
Israel lobbyThe Israel lobby is a term used to describe the diverse coalition of those who, as individuals and as groups, seek and have sought to influence the foreign policy of the United States in support of Zionism, Israel or the specific policies of its government...
. In an interview in March 2006 for
The Harvard Crimson, Dershowitz called the article "one-sided" and its authors "liars" and "bigots." The following day on MSNBC's
Scarborough CountryScarborough Country was an opinion/analysis show broadcast on MSNBC Monday - Thursday at 9 P.M. ET. It was hosted by former congressman Joe Scarborough....
, he suggested the paper had been taken 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 subsequently wrote a report challenging the paper, arguing that it contained "three types of major errors: quotations are wrenched out of context, important facts are misstated or omitted, and embarrassingly weak logic is employed." In a letter in the
London Review of Books in May 2006, Mearsheimer and Walt denied that they had used any racist sources for their article, writing that Dershowitz had offered no evidence to support what they said was his false claim.
2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict
In July 2006, Dershowitz wrote a series of articles defending the conduct of the
Israel Defense ForcesThe Israel Defense Forces , commonly known in Israel by the Hebrew acronym Tzahal , are the military forces of the State of Israel. They consist of the ground forces, air force and navy. It is the sole military wing of the Israeli security forces, and has no civilian jurisdiction within Israel...
during the
2006 Israel-Lebanon conflictThe 2006 Lebanon War, also called the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War and known in Lebanon as the July War #Other uses|Tammūz]]) and in Israel as the Second Lebanon War , was a 34-day military conflict in Lebanon, northern Israel and the Israeli-occupied territories. The principal parties were Hezbollah...
. There was an international outcry at the time regarding escalating Lebanese civilian deaths and the destruction of civilian infrastructure resulting from Israel's stated attempt to weaken or destroy
Hezbollah. After the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
Louise ArbourLouise Arbour, is the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, a former justice of the Supreme Court of Canada and the Court of Appeal for Ontario and a former Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda...
indicated that Israeli officials might be investigated and indicted for possible war crimes, Dershowitz labeled her statement "bizarre," called for her dismissal, and wrote about what he called the "absurdity and counterproductive nature of current international law." In a
Boston Globe editorial several days later, he argued that Israel was not to blame for civilian deaths: "Israel has every self-interest in minimizing civilian casualties, whereas the terrorists have every self-interest in maximizing them—on both sides. Israel should not be condemned for doing what every democracy would and should do: taking every reasonable military step to stop the killing of their own civilians."
Second Amendment and the U.S. Constitution
Dershowitz is strongly opposed to firearms ownership and the
Second AmendmentThe Second Amendment to the United States Constitution is the part of the United States Bill of Rights that protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms. It was adopted on December 15, 1791, along with the rest of the Bill of Rights.In 2008 and 2010, the Supreme Court issued two Second...
, and supports repealing the amendment, but he vigorously opposes using the judicial system to read it out of the Constitution because it would open the way for further revisions to the Bill of Rights and Constitution by the courts. "Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming it's not an individual right or that it's too much of a public safety hazard don't see the danger in the big picture. They're courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don't like."
Views on torture
Following the
September 11, 2001 attacksThe September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks (also referred to as September 11, September 11th or 9/119/11 is pronounced "nine eleven". The slash is not part of the pronunciation...
, Dershowitz published an article in
The San Francisco Chronicle entitled "Want to Torture? Get a Warrant," in which he advocated the issuance of warrants permitting the
tortureTorture is the act of inflicting severe pain as a means of punishment, revenge, forcing information or a confession, or simply as an act of cruelty. Throughout history, torture has often been used as a method of political re-education, interrogation, punishment, and coercion...
of terrorism suspects, if there were 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." He argued that authorities should be permitted to use non-lethal torture in a "ticking time bomb scenario," and that it would be less destructive to the rule of law to regulate the process than to leave it to the discretion of individual law-enforcement agents. He favors preventing the government from prosecuting the subject of torture based on information revealed during such an interrogation. The "ticking time bomb scenario" is the subject of a play,
The Dershowitz Protocol, by Canadian author Robert Fothergill, in which the American government has established a protocol of "intensified interrogation" for terrorist suspects.
William F. SchulzWilliam F. "Bill" Schulz was the Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, the U.S. division of Amnesty International, from March 1994 to 2006. He is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister, and served as president of the Unitarian Universalist Association from 1985 to 1993. He is...
, Executive Director of the U.S. section of
Amnesty InternationalAmnesty International is an international non-governmental organisation whose stated mission is "to conduct research and generate action to prevent and end grave abuses of human rights, and to demand justice for those whose rights have been violated."Following a publication of Peter Benenson's...
, found Dershowitz's ticking-bomb scenario unrealistic because, he argued, 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." James Bamford of
The Washington Post described one of the practices recommended by Dershowitz—the "sterilized needle being shoved under the fingernails"—as "chillingly Nazi-like."
Animal rights
Dershowitz is one of a number of scholars at
Harvard Law SchoolHarvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...
who have expressed their support for limited
animal rightsAnimal rights, also known as animal liberation, is the idea that the most basic interests of non-human animals should be afforded the same consideration as the similar interests of human beings...
. In his
Rights from Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights (2004), he writes that, in order to avoid human beings treating each other the way we treat animals, we have made what he calls the "somewhat arbitrary decision" to single out our own species for different and better treatment. "Does this subject us to the charge of
speciesismSpeciesism is the assigning of different values or rights to beings on the basis of their species membership. The term was created by British psychologist Richard D...
? Of course it does, and we cannot justify it, except by the fact that in the world in which we live, humans make the rules. That reality imposes on us a special responsibility to be fair and compassionate to those on whom we impose our rules. Hence the argument for animal rights."
Books
- 1982: The Best Defense. ISBN 978-0-394-50736-1.
- 1985: Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bülow Case. ISBN 978-0-394-53903-4.
- 1988: Taking Liberties: A Decade of Hard Cases, Bad Laws, and Bum Raps. ISBN 978-0-8092-4616-8.
- 1991: Chutzpah. ISBN 978-0-316-18137-2.
- 1992: Contrary to Popular Opinion. ISBN 978-0-88687-701-9.
- 1994: The Advocate's Devil (fiction). ISBN 978-0-446-51759-1.
- 1994: The Abuse Excuse: And Other Cop-Outs, Sob Stories, and Evasions of Responsibility. ISBN 978-0-316-18135-8.
- 1996: Reasonable Doubts: The Criminal Justice System and the O.J. Simpson Case. ISBN 978-0-684-83021-6.
- 1997: The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century. ISBN 978-0-316-18133-4.
- 1998: Sexual McCarthyism: Clinton, Starr, and the Emerging Constitutional Crisis. ISBN 978-0-465-01628-0.
- 1999: Just Revenge (fiction). ISBN 978-0-446-60871-8.
- 2000: The Genesis of Justice: Ten Stories of Biblical Injustice that Led to the Ten Commandments and Modern Law. Warner Books. ISBN 978-0-446-67677-9.
- 2001: Letters to a Young Lawyer. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-01631-0.
- 2001: Supreme Injustice: How the High Court Hijacked Election 2000
Supreme Injustice: How the High Court Hijacked Election 2000 is a book by Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz. Dershowitz criticized as partisan the U.S. Supreme Court's 5-4 majority decision in Bush v...
. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-514827-5.
- 2002: Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-09766-5.
- 2002: Shouting Fire: Civil Liberties in a Turbulent Age. Little Brown. ISBN 978-0-316-18141-9.
- 2003: The Case for Israel
The Case for Israel is a New York Times bestseller by Alan Dershowitz, a law professor at Harvard University. The book responds to common criticisms of Israel....
. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-0-471-46502-7
- 2003: America Declares Independence. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-0-471-26482-8.
- 2004: America on Trial: Inside the Legal Battles That Transformed Our Nation. Warner Books. ISBN 978-0-446-52058-4.
- 2004: Rights From Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights. ISBN 978-0-465-01713-3.
- 2005: The Case for Peace: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Can be Resolved
The Case for Peace: How The Arab–Israeli Conflict Can Be Resolved is the sequel to The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz.-Summary:Dershowitz was originally planning to write The Case Against Israel's Enemies, however, after the death of Yasser Arafat the author chose to focus on more positive and...
. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-0-471-74317-0); .
- 2006: Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways. W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-06012-6.
- 2007: Blasphemy: How the Religious Right is Hijacking the Declaration of Independence. ISBN 978-0-470-08455-7.
- 2007: Finding Jefferson: A Lost Letter, a Remarkable Discovery, and the First Amendment in an Age of Terrorism. ISBN 978-0-470-16711-3.
- 2008: Is There a Right to Remain Silent?: Coercive Interrogation and the Fifth Amendment After 9/11. ISBN 978-0-19-530779-5.
- 2008: The Case Against Israel's Enemies: Exposing Jimmy Carter and Others Who Stand in the Way of Peace. ISBN 978-0-470-37992-9.
- 2009: Mouth of Webster, Head of Clay essay in The Face in the Mirror: Writers Reflect on Their Dreams of Youth and the Reality of Age. ISBN 978-1-59102-752-2.
- 2009: The Case For Moral Clarity: Israel, Hamas and Gaza. ISBN 978-0-9661548-5-6.
- 2010: The Trials of Zion. ISBN 978-0-446-57673-4.
Further reading
- Upham, S. Phineas (ed.). Philosophers in Conversation: Interviews from the Harvard Review of Philosophy, Routledge, 2002, pp. 64–70.
- Berkow, Ira. Court Vision: Unexpected Views on the Lure of Basketball, University of Nebraska Press, 2004, pp. 207–216.
- Dershowitz, Alan (ed.). What Israel Means to Me: By 80 Prominent Writers, Performers, Scholars, Politicians, and Journalists, John Wiley & Sons, 2007, pp. 1–6.
- Goldberg, Elizabeth Swanson. Beyond Terror: Gender, Narrative, Human Rights, Rutgers University Press, 2007, pp. 88–95, 101.
- Loewenstein, Antony. My Israel Question, Melbourne University Press, 2007.
- Dershowitz, Alan. "Echoes of 1938" in Helmreich, William B.; Rosenblum, Mark; Schimel, David. (eds.). The Jewish Condition: Challenges and Responses — 1938–2008, Transaction Publishers, 2008, pp. 39–44.
- Norwood, Stephen H.; Pollack, Eunice G. (eds.). Encyclopedia of American Jewish History (Volume 1), ABC-CLIO, 2008, pp. 53–54.
- Rejali, Darius
Professor Darius Rejali is an Iranian-born American academic specialised on torture, who teaches political science at Reed College.- Biography :...
. Torture and Democracy, Princeton University Press, 2009.
External links
- Alan Dershowitz at The Huffington Post
The Huffington Post is an American news website and content-aggregating blog founded by Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer, and Jonah Peretti, featuring liberal minded columnists and various news sources. The site offers coverage of politics, theology, media, business, entertainment, living, style,...
(June 2005– ). Dershowitz's blog.
- Alan M. Dershowitz Faculty directory entry at Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...
, incl. hyperlinked "Bibliography.".
- Alan M. Dershowitz Official website. (Top menu features hyperlinks to his biography and selected publications.)
- Interview with Alan Dershowitz from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
- Alan M. Dershowitz Personal group space at Gather.com.
- SWINDLE Magazine Interview
- Alan Dershowitz debates Meir Kahane 1985
- Alan Dershowitz Playlist Appearance on WMBR's Dinnertime Sampler May 11, 2005