Alan Dershowitz

• 1. Introduction

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  Alan Morton Dershowitz is an American lawyer and law professor, and by his own account his career began as a joke at the expense of his teachers. He later recalled that they steered him toward work that "requires a big mouth and no brain... so I became a lawyer."

  In the decades since, he has become a regular presence in television studios and newspaper columns. He is known as a legal analyst, a political commentator, and an author of books on law, politics and the Middle East. He has also taken on high-profile causes and clients that many people wanted nothing to do with.

  This documentary asks what pulls a lawyer toward the defendants others avoid. It asks why a man who calls himself a civil libertarian accepts clients whom much of the public had already judged. And it asks what his long list of public quarrels, with presidents, professors and fellow lawyers, reveals about how he believes the law should work.

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• 2. Brooklyn To Harvard

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  Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is where Dershowitz was born on the 1st of September 1938, the son of Claire, whose maiden name was Ringel, and Harry Dershowitz. They were an Orthodox Jewish couple, and the family settled in Borough Park. Harry helped found the Young Israel of Boro Park Synagogue and served as its president in the 1960s. He also sat on the board of the Etz Chaim School and, in retirement, co-owned the Manhattan firm Merit Sales Company.

  In 1952, at age 14, the future professor took his first job, at a deli factory on Manhattan's Lower East Side. For high school he went to Yeshiva University High School, an independent boys' prep school in Manhattan, where he played basketball. He studied political science at Brooklyn College and graduated in 1959 with a Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude. Then came Yale Law School, where he was editor-in-chief of The Yale Law Journal and finished first in the class of 1962.

  From 1962 to 1963, Chief Judge David L. Bazelon of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit employed him as a law clerk. Dershowitz remembered the job with mixed feelings: "Bazelon was my best and worst boss at once." He added that the judge "worked me to the bone" and "didn't hesitate to call at 2 a.m." Yet he credited Bazelon with teaching him how to be a civil libertarian. He summed up the judge as halfway between a slave master and a father figure.

  A second clerkship followed from 1963 to 1964, this time for Justice Arthur Goldberg of the U.S. Supreme Court. Dershowitz told Tom Van Riper of Forbes that this post was probably his second big break. The first had come at 14 or 15, when a camp counselor told him he was smart but that his mind worked a little differently.

  In 1964 he joined the Harvard Law School faculty as an assistant professor. By 1967 he was a full professor at the age of 28, the youngest in the school's history up to that point. In 1993 he was named the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, and he retired from teaching in 2013. He is now a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute. Through every year at Harvard he kept a practice in criminal and civil law, and that practice is where his public name was made.

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• 3. Famous Cases

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  As of 2009, Dershowitz had won 13 of the 15 murder and attempted murder cases he handled as a criminal appellate lawyer. Alongside those cases, his client list grew to include Patty Hearst, Leona Helmsley, Jim Bakker, Mike Tyson and Michael Milken.

  In 1976 he won the appeal of Harry Reems, who had been convicted of distributing obscenity for acting in the pornographic film Deep Throat. Dershowitz argued on First Amendment grounds against censoring pornography. He also maintained that consuming it did no harm.

  Claus von Bülow, a British socialite, came to him next. Von Bülow had been convicted of the attempted murder of his wife, Sunny, who fell into a coma in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1980 and died in 2008. In 1984 Dershowitz got the conviction overturned, and von Bülow was acquitted at a retrial. Dershowitz told the story in Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bülow Case, published in 1985. The 1990 film adaptation cast Ron Silver as the lawyer, and Dershowitz himself appeared as a judge.

  In his memoir Taking the Stand, Dershowitz recounts a dinner that von Bülow hosted after the acquittal. Dershowitz warned that he would stay away from a victory party, and von Bülow promised only a dinner for "several interesting friends." The novelist Norman Mailer attended. After Dershowitz laid out why the evidence pointed to innocence, Mailer reportedly grabbed his wife's arm and said he had expected to dine with a man who really tried to kill his wife. "This is boring," Mailer added.

  In 1989 Dershowitz filed a defamation suit on behalf of Rabbi Avi Weiss against Cardinal Józef Glemp, then Archbishop of Warsaw. That summer Weiss and six other members of New York's Jewish community had protested at Auschwitz over a Carmelite convent there. They were ejected after trying to climb a wall around the convent. In an August 1989 speech, Glemp said the group had not killed the nuns or destroyed the convent only because they were stopped. In the same speech he made antisemitic remarks suggesting that Jews control the news media. Dershowitz told the story of the suit in his 1991 book Chutzpah.

  In 1990 the federal government indicted Kīrtanānanda Swami of the Hare Krishna movement on five counts of racketeering, six of mail fraud, and conspiracy to murder two opponents, Stephen Bryant and Charles St. Denis. Prosecutors said he had illegally amassed more than $10.5 million over four years. They also said he ordered the killings because the victims threatened to reveal his sexual abuse of minors. On the 29th of March 1991 a jury convicted him on nine of the 11 charges but could not reach a verdict on the murder charges. Dershowitz's defense persuaded the Court of Appeals to throw out the convictions. The court found that evidence of child molestation had unfairly prejudiced the jury, since Kīrtanānanda was not charged with those crimes.

  In 1995 Dershowitz joined O. J. Simpson's murder trial as appellate adviser, part of the legal "Dream Team" with Johnnie Cochran and F. Lee Bailey. He wrote about it in Reasonable Doubts: The Criminal Justice System and the O. J. Simpson Case, published in 1996. In that book he predicted that the case would not be remembered in the next century. He ranked it with Leopold and Loeb and the Lindbergh case, and below the Nuremberg trials and the Rosenberg trial. He placed it somewhere in the middle of his own career. The trial has nonetheless been described as the most publicized criminal trial in American history, and his next clients drew an even harder public edge.

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• 4. Unpopular Clients

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  In June 2008, Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to a state charge of procuring a girl under age 18 for prostitution and was sentenced to 18 months in prison. Dershowitz sat on the legal defense team for that first criminal case. Epstein had been investigated after accusations that he repeatedly solicited sex from minors. The two had become friends through a mutual acquaintance, Lynn Forester de Rothschild.

  The plea followed a non-prosecution agreement that Dershowitz helped negotiate, and it drew heavy criticism. In 2006 he had also been involved in efforts to discredit Epstein's young accusers. In 2018 Dershowitz claimed he had ended his social contact with Epstein while continuing to give legal advice.

  In April 2019, the Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre filed a federal civil defamation lawsuit against Dershowitz in New York. It was dismissed on the 8th of November 2022, and neither side was awarded fees. In 2025 Dershowitz said he knew the names associated with the so-called Epstein list but was bound by confidentiality. It was also reported that he had contributed a mocked-up, fictional excerpt from Vanity Fair magazine to Epstein's 2003 birthday book. According to Bloomberg, Epstein gave Dershowitz's wife a new Lexus. Dershowitz said the car was part of his legal fee, because his wife would drive Epstein around.

  Other clients raised different questions. In 2011 Dershowitz consulted for the legal team of Julian Assange, who faced possible U.S. charges for distributing classified documents through WikiLeaks. Dershowitz said Assange should be considered a journalist. "I believe that to protect the First Amendment we need to protect new electronic media vigorously," he said.

  In May 2018 he joined the defense of Harvey Weinstein as a consultant to Weinstein's lawyer, Benjamin Brafman. His job was to advise the team on obtaining documents from The Weinstein Company related to the sexual abuse allegations. That work fed directly into his 2019 book Guilt by Accusation: The Challenge of Proving Innocence in the Age of #MeToo. Another client then pulled him into the biggest political argument of his career.

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• 5. Trump And The Parties

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  In October 2016, Dershowitz compared Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and declared there was no comparison between them on which had engaged in more corruption. He had campaigned against Trump in that election and criticized his travel ban, his rescission of protections for "Dreamers," and his failure to single out white nationalists after the Charlottesville protests. He said he voted for Clinton.

  By 2018, though, he was defending Trump's legal positions on television. In January of that year he called attacks on Trump's mental fitness "very dangerous" and said there was "no case" for obstruction of justice over the firing of FBI Director James Comey. He called the indictment of Michael Flynn the strangest he had ever seen. He also said "collusion" is not a crime. Yet he called Trump's alleged disclosure of classified information to Russia "the most serious charge ever made against a sitting president." His 2018 book The Case Against Impeaching Trump made the case against removal. He also defended the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on Fox News, calling an accuser's affidavit so flawed that a good defense attorney could tear it apart in 30 seconds. Liberals criticized him and conservatives praised him. He insisted he was "a liberal Democrat in politics, but a neutral civil libertarian when it comes to the Constitution."

  In January 2020 he joined Trump's team for the Senate impeachment trial. Commentators noted that he was a Hillary Clinton supporter. The announcement described him as "nonpartisan when it comes to the Constitution." Dershowitz said he would accept no pay, or would give any payment to charity. He said he was there to defend the integrity of the Constitution, and that this happened to benefit the president. His role was limited to oral arguments before the Senate.

  Those arguments held that proof of a crime is required to impeach a president. Some commentators said this contradicted what he had said during the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Dershowitz later retracted his Clinton-era statements, saying that to the extent there were inconsistencies, "I am correct today." He pointed out that Clinton had been charged with perjury, so the question then was different. Another line drew wider alarm, that a president who does something he believes will help his reelection cannot be committing an impeachable quid pro quo. Dershowitz later said it was mischaracterized and that a president seeking reelection "cannot commit crimes."

  In 2020 he sued CNN for defamation over its portrayal of those comments. He set up a legal defense fund to pay for the suit. In 2022 CNN asked the court to make the fund disclose its donors, and the court later ordered it to. In 2023 the judge ruled against Dershowitz on the defamation issue.

  After the trial, he used his ties to the administration to lobby for clemency for his other clients, and he played a role in at least 12 grants. He failed to win a commutation of the 10-year sentence of George Nader, who had pleaded guilty to child pornography and sex trafficking. In 2021 he called Trump's rally before the storming of the Capitol "constitutionally protected" speech and said defending Trump at trial would be his "honor and privilege." Trump reportedly considered him for his defense team.

  His own party affiliation tells a parallel story. Dershowitz first registered as a Democrat in 1959. He endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primaries and Barack Obama's reelection in 2012. In 2020 he backed Joe Biden and said he could not vote for Bernie Sanders over Sanders's campaigning for Jeremy Corbyn. In September 2024 he renounced the Democratic Party and became an Independent. He cited several "anti-Jewish" lawmakers in the party and the convention that nominated Vice President Kamala Harris. On the 20th of April 2026, he published an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal saying he had registered as a Republican.

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• 6. Israel And Its Critics

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  Jimmy Carter's 2006 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid argued that Israel's control of Palestinian land is the main obstacle to peace. Dershowitz challenged the former president to a debate at Brandeis University. Carter refused, saying he did not want a conversation with Dershowitz, even indirectly, because the lawyer "knows nothing about the situation in Palestine." Carter spoke at Brandeis in January 2007, but only students and staff could attend. Dershowitz was invited to respond on the same stage only after Carter had left.

  The quarrel fits a pattern. Dershowitz is a strong supporter of Israel who describes himself as both "pro-Israel and pro-Palestine." He says he wants a vibrant, democratic, economically viable and peaceful Palestinian state beside Israel. He has also said that, were he an Israeli, he would be "a person of the left and voting the left." He criticized Obama after the U.S. abstained on United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, which condemned Israeli settlement building in the occupied Palestinian territory.

  He has publicly debated Meir Kahane, Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein. In April 2009, at the Doha Debates held at Georgetown University, he and Dore Gold of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs spoke against the motion that it was time for the U.S. to get tough on Israel. Their opponents were Avraham Burg, a former Speaker of the Knesset, and Michael Scheuer, a former chief of the CIA's Bin Laden Issue Station. Dershowitz's side lost, with 63% of the audience voting for the motion.

  In the spring of 2002, a petition urged Harvard and MIT to divest from companies selling arms to Israel. It gathered over 600 signatures, including 74 from Harvard faculty and 56 from MIT faculty. One signer was Paul D. Hanson, master of Harvard's Winthrop House. Dershowitz staged a debate for 200 students in the house's Junior Common Room. According to The Harvard Crimson, he told them, "Your House master is a bigot, and you ought to know that." He also promised to sue any professor who voted against a colleague's tenure over that person's position on Israel.

  A sharper dispute followed the publication of The Case for Israel in 2003. Norman Finkelstein of DePaul University said the book contained material plagiarized from Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial. Dershowitz denied it, and Harvard's president, Derek Bok, investigated and found no plagiarism. The Los Angeles attorney Frank Menetrez wrote an analysis that supported Finkelstein's charge. Dershowitz called the charge verifiably false and politically motivated. In October 2006 he wrote to DePaul faculty urging them to oppose Finkelstein's tenure, and in June 2007 the university denied it.

  In March 2006, John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of the Harvard Kennedy School published "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" in The London Review of Books. The paper called Dershowitz an "apologist" for the Israel lobby. He answered in The Harvard Crimson that the paper was "one-sided" and its authors "liars" and "bigots." The next day on MSNBC he said it appeared to be copied from a neo-Nazi site, a radical Islamic site and David Duke's site. He then wrote a report charging three kinds of major errors. In May 2006, Mearsheimer and Walt replied that he had offered no evidence of racist sources. Dershowitz also wrote a paper on how criticism of the Israel lobby can slide into antisemitic conspiracy theory. Early drafts went to Jeffrey Epstein, whom he was then representing.

  His positions on the region range widely. In 2006 he argued that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad should be prosecuted for incitement to genocide over his threat of "wiping Israel off the map." On the 29th of February 2012 he filed an amicus brief supporting the removal of the People's Mujahedin of Iran from the State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations. In January 2018, while under contract to advise Joey Allaham, a lobbyist working for the Qatari government, he questioned claims that Qatar funds terrorist groups. After Hamas's the 7th of October attacks he praised Israel's military response, and he writes essays on the war in his newsletter.

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• 7. Rights And Their Limits

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  In 1963, while clerking for Justice Arthur Goldberg, Dershowitz wrote a memo at the justice's request arguing that the death penalty violated the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishments. It was never published as an opinion. He sent it to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the ACLU, which then waged a campaign against capital punishment. That campaign produced a de facto moratorium on executions beginning in 1967 and the 1972 Supreme Court case Furman v. Georgia, which found the death penalty as then applied unconstitutional. The 1976 case Gregg v. Georgia upheld many states' revised statutes. Dershowitz remains an unyielding opponent of capital punishment.

  After the September 11 attacks, he published an article in the San Francisco Chronicle titled "Want to Torture? Get a Warrant." It proposed warrants allowing the torture of terrorism suspects in a ticking time bomb scenario. A warrant would require an "absolute need to obtain immediate information in order to save lives" and probable cause that the suspect has it. He argued that regulating the practice would damage the rule of law less than leaving it to individual officers. He also favored barring prosecutors from using the suspect's statements against him. William F. Schulz of Amnesty International's U.S. section called the scenario unrealistic. In his view it would require authorities to know that a bomb is planted, that it is about to explode, and that the suspect holds the key. Robert Fothergill's 2003 play The Dershowitz Protocol takes its name from the idea.

  On guns, he supports control and has said the Second Amendment has "no place in modern society." He backs repealing it, but he vigorously opposes using the courts to read it out of the Constitution. In his view, liberals who try this are "courting disaster" by inviting others to use the same method against provisions they dislike.

  He is also among several Harvard Law scholars who support limited animal rights. In Rights from Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights, published in 2004, he calls the human decision to single out our own species a "somewhat arbitrary decision." He admits it invites the charge of speciesism and says it can only be justified by the fact that humans make the rules. That reality, he argues, creates a duty to be fair and compassionate toward those the rules bind.

  A later case turned on a different clause. Dershowitz represented Shirley Shawe, who, like the other defendant in the TransPerfect dispute, had held shares in the company. He argued that the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, and due process under the Fifth and Fourteenth, protect individual shareholders in corporate disputes. He sought to bring the Delaware Chancery Court's ordered auction of the company before the Supreme Court.

  In June 2018 he turned on one of his old allies in an op-ed. He accused the American Civil Liberties Union of becoming hyper-partisan and abandoning its role as a neutral group of politically diverse people committed to core civil liberties. He saw the shift as a symptom of a wider trend in which the right moves further right and the center shrinks. He also blamed Trump for pushing the ACLU toward partisan politics by denying fundamental civil liberties.

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• 8. Family And Recognition

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  In 1959, when he was 20, Dershowitz married Sue Barlach, who was 18. The two had met at a Jewish summer camp in the Catskills during high school. In his book Chutzpah he calls her an "Orthodox Jewish girl." They had two sons. Elon Dershowitz, born in 1961, was a film producer and died in 2025. Jamin Dershowitz, born in 1963, is an attorney and general counsel for the Women's National Basketball Association.

  The couple separated in 1973 and divorced in 1976. Barlach was first given custody, but Dershowitz fought for it and was later awarded full custody of the children. During the divorce proceedings, Barlach alleged that Dershowitz physically abused her, and that she needed medical treatment and therapy. The New Yorker reported that she later worked as a research librarian and "drowned in the East River, in an apparent suicide" on the 31st of December 1983.

  Jamin married a Roman Catholic, which helped prompt his father to write The Vanishing American Jew. The book is dedicated to them and their children, whom Dershowitz regards as Jewish. He has two grandchildren by Jamin. In 1986 Dershowitz married Carolyn Cohen, a retired neuropsychologist, and they have one child, born in 1990. They divide their time among homes in Martha's Vineyard, Miami Beach and Manhattan. In 1997 he belonged to a Conservative minyan at Harvard Hillel while remaining a secular Jew, and in February 2024 he signed the Jewish Future Promise.

  Honors have come steadily. He was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1979. In 1983 the Anti-Defamation League gave him the William O. Douglas First Amendment Award for his civil rights work. In November 2007 the Russian Jewish Community Foundation awarded him the Soviet Jewry Freedom Award. In December 2011 he received the Menachem Begin Award of Honor from the Menachem Begin Heritage Center. He has a stone on the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's Celebrity Path. His honorary law doctorates come from Yeshiva University, Hebrew Union College, Monmouth University, the University of Haifa, Syracuse University, Fitchburg State College, Bar-Ilan University and Brooklyn College.

  Popular culture has taken him up too. He appeared as himself in Picket Fences, Spin City and First Monday, and in the 2019 documentary No Safe Spaces. Evan Handler played him in the 2016 series The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story. On Saturday Night Live on the 26th of January 2020, Jon Lovitz played him in a sketch in which he lands in Hell during a near-death experience and meets Jeffrey Epstein.

  His bibliography begins with The Best Defense in 1982 and includes two novels, The Advocate's Devil in 1994 and Just Revenge in 1999. It runs through The Genesis of Justice in 2000 and Taking the Stand: My Life in the Law in 2013. The most recent title listed is a 2026 book, Could President Trump Constitutionally Serve a Third Term?: My Nonpartisan Legal Analysis.

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