Alan Dershowitz
Alan Morton Dershowitz (born September 1, 1938) is a Harvard University law professor and author. He was born in Brooklyn, graduated from Yeshiva University high school and Brooklyn College. At Yale Law School, he was first in his class and editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. After clerking for Chief Judge David Bazelon and Justice Arthur Goldberg, he was appointed to the Harvard Law faculty at age 25 and became a full professor at age 28, the youngest in the school's history.He successfully defended Claus von Bülow on a charge of attempting to murder his wife with an injection of insulin, a case dramatised in the film Reversal of Fortune (1990) starring Glenn Close, Jeremy Irons, and Ron Silver as Dershowitz.
Alan Dershowitz was a member of the "dream team" of defense lawyers working for O. J. Simpson.
Shortly after the publication of The Case for Israel, Norman Finkelstein accused Dershowitz of plagiarism, noting that dozens of quotations in that book resembled, without attribution, passages quoted by Joan Peters in her From Time Immemorial --itself a title widely considered controversial for its unconventional political views. See Dershowitz-Finkelstein Affair for more.
Dershowitz has been a renowned supporter of civil rights and outspoken critic of bigotry, especially anti-Semitism. In 1983 the Anti-Defamation League awarded Mr. Dershowitz the William O. Douglas First Amendment Award for his "compassionate eloquent leadership and persistent advocacy in the struggle for civil and human rights." Nobel Laureate Elie Weisel, who presented the award, was quoted as saying, "If there had been a few people like Alan Dershowitz during the 1930s and 1940s, the history of European Jewry might have been different."
Dershowitz has also come under fire for advocating torture of suspected terrorists. He has said that in "ticking bomb" cases -- situations in which "a captured terrorist who knows of an imminent large-scale threat refuses to disclose it" -- the use of torture would be justified in order to save innocent lives. His critics, especially Amnesty International, state that torture is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the UN Convention Against Torture, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
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"[Those] who are trying to read the Second Amendment
out of the Constitution by claiming it's not an individual right [are] courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate
portions of the Constitution they don't like."
— Alan DershowitzExternal link
