Alan Dershowitz facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Alan Dershowitz
Dershowitz in 2009
Born	Alan Morton Dershowitz (1938-09-01) September 1, 1938 (age 86) New York City, U.S.
Education	Brooklyn College (BA) Yale University (LLB)
Occupation	Attorney law professor
Political party	Independent (2024–present)
Spouse(s)	Sue Barlach ​ ​ (m. 1959; div. 1976)​ Carolyn Cohen ​ (m. 1986)​
Children	3

Alan Morton Dershowitz (/ˈdɜːrʃəwɪts/ durr-SHƏ-wits; born September 1, 1938) is an American lawyer and law professor known for his work in U.S. constitutional law and American criminal law. From 1964 to 2013, he taught at Harvard Law School, where he was appointed as the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law in 1993. Dershowitz is a regular media contributor, political commentator, and legal analyst.

Dershowitz has taken on high-profile and often unpopular causes and clients. As of 2009, he had won 13 of the 15 murder and attempted murder cases he handled as a criminal appellate lawyer. Dershowitz has represented such celebrity clients as Mike Tyson, Patty Hearst, Leona Helmsley, Julian Assange, and Jim Bakker. Major legal victories have included two successful appeals that overturned convictions, first for Harry Reems in 1976, then in 1984 for Claus von Bülow, who had been convicted of the attempted murder of his wife, Sunny. In 1995, Dershowitz served as the appellate adviser on the murder trial of O. J. Simpson as part of the legal "Dream Team" alongside Johnnie Cochran and F. Lee Bailey.

Dershowitz is the author of several books about politics and the law, including Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bülow Case (1985), the basis of the 1990 film; Chutzpah (1991); Reasonable Doubts: The Criminal Justice System and the O. J. Simpson Case (1996); The Case for Israel (2003); and The Case for Peace (2005). His two most recent works are The Case Against Impeaching Trump (2018) and Guilt by Accusation: The Challenge of Proving Innocence in the Age of #MeToo (2019). An ardent supporter of Israel, he has written several books on the Arab–Israeli conflict.

Early life and education

Dershowitz was born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on September 1, 1938, the son of Claire (née Ringel) and Harry Dershowitz, an Orthodox Jewish couple. He was raised in Borough Park. His father was a founder and president of the Young Israel of Boro Park 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 first job was at a deli factory on Manhattan's Lower East Side in 1952, at age 14.

Dershowitz attended Yeshiva University High School, an independent boys' prep school in Manhattan owned by Yeshiva University, where he played on the basketball team. He was a rebellious student, often criticized by his teachers. 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 studied political science at Brooklyn College, graduating in 1959 with a Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude. He then attended Yale Law School, where he was editor-in-chief of The Yale Law Journal. He graduated in 1962 ranked first in his class with a Bachelor of Laws. He was a member of a Conservative minyan at Harvard Hillel but is a secular Jew.

Legal and teaching career

After law school, Dershowitz clerked for Judge David L. Bazelon (pictured), whom he has described as one of his most influential mentors.

After graduating from law school, Dershowitz was a law clerk for chief judge David L. Bazelon of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1962 to 1963. Dershowitz described Bazelon as an influential mentor. He has said, "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." From 1963 to 1964 Dershowitz clerked for the Justice Arthur Goldberg of the U.S. Supreme Court.

He told Tom Van Riper of Forbes that getting a Supreme Court clerkship was probably his second big break. His first was at age 14 or 15, when a camp counselor told him he was smart but that his mind operated a little differently. He joined the Harvard Law School faculty as an assistant professor in 1964, and was made a full professor in 1967 at age 28, at that time the youngest full professor of law in the school's history. He was appointed as the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law in 1993. Dershowitz retired from teaching at Harvard Law in 2013. He is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.

Throughout his tenure at Harvard, Dershowitz maintained his legal practice in both criminal and civil law. His clients have included such high-profile figures as Patty Hearst, Harry Reems, Leona Helmsley, Jim Bakker, Mike Tyson, Michael Milken, O. J. Simpson and Kirtanananda Swami. Dershowitz reportedly was one of Nelson Mandela's lawyers.

Notable clients

Claus von Bülow (1984)

In one of his first high-profile cases, Dershowitz represented Claus von Bülow, a British socialite, at his appeal for the attempted murder of his wife, Sunny von Bülow, who went into a coma in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1980 (and later died in 2008). He succeeded in having 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 adapted into a movie in 1990. Dershowitz was played by actor Ron Silver, and Dershowitz himself had a cameo as a judge.

In his book Taking the Stand, Dershowitz recounts that von Bülow had a dinner party after he was found not guilty at his retrial. Dershowitz told him that he would not attend if it was a "victory party," and von Bülow assured him that it was only a dinner for "several interesting friends." Norman Mailer attended the dinner where, among other things, Dershowitz explained why the evidence pointed to von Bülow's innocence. Dershowitz described Mailer grabbing his wife's arm and saying: "Let's get out of here. I think this guy is innocent. I thought we were going to be having dinner with a man who actually tried to kill his wife. This is boring."

Avi Weiss (1989)

In 1989, Dershowitz filed a defamation suit against Cardinal Józef Glemp, then Archbishop of Warsaw, on behalf of Rabbi Avi Weiss. That summer, Weiss and six other members of the Jewish community in New York had staged a protest at the Auschwitz concentration camp over the presence of a controversial convent of Carmelite nuns. Weiss and the protesters were ejected after attempting to scale a wall surrounding the convent. In an August 1989 speech, Glemp referenced the incident and ascribed a violent intent to the protesters, saying, "Recently, a squad of seven Jews from New York launched an attack on the convent at Oswiecim [Auschwitz]. They did not kill the nuns or destroy the convent only because they were stopped." In the same speech, Glemp made antisemitic remarks suggesting that Jews control the news media. Dershowitz's suit centered on these statements. His account of the lawsuit appears in his 1991 book Chutzpah.

O. J. Simpson (1995)

During the murder trial of O. J. Simpson, Dershowitz acted as an appellate adviser to Simpson's defense team, and later wrote a book about it, Reasonable Doubts: The Criminal Justice System and the O. J. Simpson Case (1996). Dershowitz 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 trials, the Rosenberg trial, Sacco and Vanzetti. It is on par with Leopold and Loeb and the Lindbergh 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.

Julian Assange (2011)

In 2011, Dershowitz served as a consultant for Julian Assange's legal team while Assange was facing the prospect of charges from the U.S. government for distributing classified documents through WikiLeaks. Of his decision to engage with Assange's team, Dershowitz said that Assange should be considered a journalist, adding, "I believe that to protect the First Amendment we need to protect new electronic media vigorously."

Donald Trump (2020)

Dershowitz arguing on the Senate floor during the impeachment of Donald Trump

In January 2020, Dershowitz joined President Donald Trump's legal team as Trump was being tried on impeachment charges in the Senate. Dershowitz's addition to the team was notable, as commentators pointed out that he was a Hillary Clinton supporter and had offered occasionally controversial television defenses of Trump in the preceding two years. The statement announcing Dershowitz's joining the team said that Dershowitz was "nonpartisan when it comes to the Constitution." Dershowitz said he would not accept any compensation, and if he was paid anything, he would donate it to charity. He defended his representation of Trump, which was controversial among Trump critics, saying, "I'm there to try to defend the integrity of the constitution. That benefits President Trump in this case." Dershowitz said that his role would be limited to presenting oral arguments before the Senate opposing impeachment.

In his oral arguments, Dershowitz said that proof of a crime is required to impeach a president. Some commentators suggested that his position contradicted his statements during the impeachment of Bill Clinton, when he said no proof of a crime was required. Dershowitz later retracted his statements made during the Clinton era, saying, "To the extent there are inconsistencies between my current position and what I said 22 years ago, I am correct today .... During the Clinton impeachment, the issue was not whether a technical crime was required, because he was charged with perjury."

Some of his comments were considered to represent an overly expansive view of executive power. He argued, "If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment." Dershowitz later said his comment was mischaracterized: "a president seeking reelection cannot do anything he wants. He is not above the law. He cannot commit crimes."

After the trial, Dershowitz used his ties with the Trump administration to lobby it to give clemency to his various other clients. He played a role in at least 12 clemency grants, as well as unsuccessfully lobbying the administration to commute the 10-year sentence of George Nader.

Academic and other disputes

Norman Finkelstein

Shortly after the publication of Dershowitz's The Case for Israel (2003), Norman Finkelstein of DePaul University said the book contained material plagiarized from Joan Peters's book From Time Immemorial. Dershowitz denied the allegation. Harvard's president, Derek Bok, investigated the allegation and determined that no plagiarism had occurred. Los Angeles attorney Frank Menetrez wrote an article analyzing the dispute's details that supported Finkelstein's charges, concluding: "I don't see how Dershowitz could, purely by coincidence, have precisely reproduced all of Peters' errors [in quoting The Innocents Abroad] if he was working from the original Twain." CounterPunch published Dershowitz's response and Menetrez's reply. Dershowitz dismissed the charges as verifiably false and politically motivated by hostility to his support for Israel, and Menetrez reaffirmed his view that the evidence pointed to Dershowitz having plagiarized his sources.

In October 2006, Dershowitz wrote to DePaul University faculty members to lobby against Finkelstein's application for tenure, accusing Finkelstein of academic dishonesty. 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 Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs at Harvard Kennedy School, co-wrote a paper titled "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy", published in The London Review of Books. Mearsheimer and Walt criticized what they called "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. They referred to Dershowitz specifically as an "apologist" for the Israel lobby. In a March 2006 interview with The Harvard Crimson, Dershowitz called the article "one-sided" and its authors "liars" and "bigots". The next day, on MSNBC's Scarborough Country, he suggested the paper had been derived from multiple 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 failed to offer any evidence to support his claim.

Personal life and family

Dershowitz's first wife was Sue Barlach. In his book Chutzpah, he described Barlach as an "Orthodox Jewish girl." The two met during high school at a Jewish summer camp in the Catskills. They married in 1959, when Dershowitz was 20 and Barlach was 18. Barlach and Dershowitz had two sons together: Elon Dershowitz (born 1961), a film producer, and Jamin Dershowitz (born 1963), an attorney. Barlach and Dershowitz separated in 1973 and divorced in 1976. Although Barlach was initially given custody, Dershowitz fought for and was later awarded full custody of their children.

In 1986, Dershowitz married Carolyn Cohen, a retired neuropsychologist. Together they had one child, Ella (born 1990), an actress. Dershowitz and Cohen divide their time between homes in Martha's Vineyard, Miami Beach and Manhattan.

Jamin Dershowitz married Barbara, a Roman Catholic, which helped prompt Alan Dershowitz to write The Vanishing American Jew, dedicated to them and their children, whom Dershowitz regards as Jewish. He has two grandchildren by Jamin: Lori and Lyle.

Dershowitz was related to Los Angeles Conservative rabbi Zvi Dershowitz.

In February 2024, Dershowitz signed the Jewish Future Promise.

Awards and recognitions

Dershowitz was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1979, and in 1983 received the William O. Douglas First Amendment Award from the Anti-Defamation League for his work on civil rights. In November 2007, he was awarded the Soviet Jewry Freedom Award by the Russian Jewish Community Foundation. In December 2011, he was awarded the Menachem Begin Award of Honor by the Menachem Begin Heritage Center at an event co-sponsored by NGO Monitor. Dershowitz was honored with a stone in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's Celebrity Path. 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. He is a member of the International Advisory Board of NGO Monitor.

Dershowitz has appeared as himself in the television series Picket Fences, Spin City, and First Monday, and in the 2019 documentary No Safe Spaces.

Works

• 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.
• 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. 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. 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.
• 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.
• 2013: Taking the Stand: My Life in the Law. ISBN: 978-0307719270.
• 2014: Terror Tunnels: The Case for Israel's Just War Against Hamas. ISBN: 978-0795344312.
• 2015: Abraham: The World's First (But Certainly Not Last) Jewish Lawyer (Jewish Encounters Series). ISBN: 978-0805242935.
• 2016: Electile Dysfunction: A Guide for Unaroused Voters. ISBN: 978-0795350214.
• 2017: Trumped Up: How Criminalization of Political Differences Endangers Democracy. ISBN: 978-1974617890.
• 2018: The Case Against Impeaching Trump. ISBN: 978-1510742284.
• 2018: The Case Against BDS: Why Singling Out Israel for Boycott is Anti-Semitic. (self-published), ISBN: 978-1984956699.
• 2019: Defending Israel: The Story of My Relationship with My Most Challenging Client. ISBN: 978-1250179975.
• 2019: Guilt by Accusation: The Challenge of Proving Innocence in the Age of #MeToo. ISBN: 978-1510757561.
• 2019: Speaking for Israel: A Speechwriter Battles Anti-Israel Opinions at the United Nations' with Aviva Klompas. ISBN: 978-1510743915.
• 2020: Cancel Culture: The Latest Attack on Free Speech and Due Process. ISBN: 978-1510764903.
• 2021: The Case Against the New Censorship: Protecting Free Speech from Big Tech, Progressives, and Universities. ISBN: 978-1510767737
• 2023: Get Trump: The Threat to Civil Liberties, Due Process, and Our Constitutional Rule of Law. ISBN: 978-1510777811
• 2023: War Against the Jews: How to End Hamas Barbarism ISBN: 978-1510780545
• 2023: Defending Israel: Against Hamas and its Radical Left Enablers. ISBN: 978-1510780521
• 2024: War on Woke: Why the New McCarthyism Is More Dangerous Than the Old. ISBN: 978-1510780361
• 2024: The Ten Big Anti-Israel Lies and How to Refute them with Truth. ISBN: 978-1-5107-8354-6

See also

• List of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States (Seat 2)