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Alan Dershowitz
By Caleb NeelonPhoto By Peter Tannenbaum
I do a lot of things in revenge,” says lawyer, professor, and public intellectual Alan Dershowitz. “I’m a vengeful person. I want to get even with my high school teachers and all the people who thought badly of me.”
There are people who still do think badly of him, and Dershowitz reminds himself of it constantly. His personal office at the Harvard Law School is small, and on the other side of its doorway is a narrow hallway through which he passes dozens of times a day. The hallway is lined on both sides from floor to ceiling with hate mail, some of it in the form of erudite and scathing criticism from fellow academics and lawyers, some of it slur-filled scrawl from people of all walks of life.
Superstar lawyers are frequently controversial, but Alan Dershowitz makes it into a fine art. His criminal defense cases have made him infamous, most notably the murder trials of socialite Claus Von Bülow and former football star O.J. Simpson as well as other cases in which he represented boxer Mike Tyson, televangelist Jim Bakker, porn star Harry Reems, heiress Patricia Hearst, and hotelier Leona Helmsley. But just as controversial have been his books and writings, ranging from legal fiction to proposals for a peaceful and secure Israel, all written in an engaging and accessible manner designed to strip the legal profession of its elitist pretenses.
Looking at his Brooklyn childhood, one could see a bright future in controversy for Alan Dershowitz. “I got into a lot of fistfights,” he explains. But upon entering Brooklyn College, he “kinda got religion – well, the opposite: I lost religion and I got into reading.” He went to Yale Law School, was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal, graduated first in his class, clerked for Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, was appointed to Harvard Law School’s faculty at the age of 25, and then was tenured at 28. Nowadays, Dershowitz has about 5,000 cases a year cross his desk, including many of the most notorious and media-saturated. Of these 5,000, he picks two or three.
He explains how he makes his selections: “Each case is like a short marriage – you get totally involved in the process. They can go on for years and years, particularly death penalty cases. As I say to my clients, ‘This isn’t over until either you’re dead or I’m dead.’ Or, you’re saved—and I’ve saved people from death row, and that’s very gratifying. Taking a case is a very selective process. First of all, I’ve gotta get pissed off. I’ve gotta get my blood boiling. I can’t take a case just on an abstract principle. I gotta get really mad that something has gone askew, some specific injustice. Either the person has been subject to an injustice, or he’s the wrong person, or the issue is one that calls out for justice, because I gotta get my juices flowing. When I take a case, I get very emotionally involved in a deep way. Then, I’ve gotta figure out if I can do some good; there has to be a value added to the process. If any lawyer can do it, let them do it. There has to be something that I can bring to the process if I can. Third, there’s the question of timing: Is this the right time for it? Is it the right time in my life for this? Right now, book writing is more important to me than taking cases. I’m changing my priorities as I get a little older, and when you get a little older, you start thinking about how you want to be remembered. And books are hardcover and in libraries, and you want to leave something for your grandchildren.”
Dershowitz’s voluminous writing output has generated controversy that may well last long enough for his grandchildren to discuss as grown adults. As compared with the dialogue of the courtroom or the classroom, books might seem to be one-sided, but Dershowitz lists his email address in each one and encourages communication. And besides, as he explains, “My books engender such ferocious attacks that it’s rarely just a monologue.” Following 9/11, he proposed the notion of issuing warrants for torture under extraordinary circumstances, which, naturally, generated a few new bits of mail for his hallway. The point of doing so, to Dershowitz, is to get people talking. “I think of myself as a teacher. For example, that crazy idea that I wrote about a couple of years ago, that of torture warrants – it started a debate all over the world! Was it a good idea? Time will tell. Would I actually vote for it? Probably not. But as a teacher, it was a great teaching moment.” And if any of his students want to retaliate to his barrage of ideas, he’ll understand.