Alan Dershowitz Makes His Closing Argument

By his own account, Alan Dershowitz is working on his 53rd book, and soon had a plane to Miami to catch. Nevertheless, there he was on Zoom, in a memorabilia-clad office, to tell the Sun that President Trump is not his friend, that we should worry about college campuses (but not Israel), and that he has a bone to pick with Jewish leaders. The 84-year-old law professor emeritus at Harvard was the youngest full faculty member in that school’s history. He has spent his career in the courtroom and the spotlight, counting Anatoly Sharansky, Mike Tyson, Julian Assange, O.J. Simpson, and Harvey Weinstein among his clients. His staccato Brooklynesse was for decades a television staple. Mr. Dershowitz, whose 2003 book “The Case for Israel” sits dog-eared in this reporter’s childhood bedroom, is against the judicial reforms that Prime Minister Netanyanhu’s government has introduced, which would bring the Jewish state’s high court more firmly under the heel of the legislature. The law professor sees the “hard right” in Israel as moving against the judiciary, just as he perceives the “hard left” in America pursuing a similar course via court packing, term limits, and efforts to shrink the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction. Democracies, he observes, will always view unelected jurists with gimlet eyes. Despite opposing the changes proposed by Mr. Netanyahu’s justice minister as harmful to the “crown jewel” that is Israel’s Supreme Court, Mr. Dershowitz insists that “hysteria” has set in among Israel’s detractors and that they need to “calm down.” Even if these reforms are passed, he insists, Israel will abide as a “vibrant democracy,” albeit one harder to defend from its enemies. Mr. Dershowitz refuses to “do an Abe Foxman,” in reference to the longtime leader of the Anti-Defamation League who recently told the Jerusalem Post in reference to Israel’s new government: “I’ve always said that [my support of Israel] is unconditional, but it’s conditional” on the nature of Israel’s democracy. While Mr. Dershowitz is sanguine about Israel, he is far from optimistic about the campus where he spent more than a half century teaching. “Harvard is moving in the wrong direction,” he notes, toward “wokeness” and “limits on free speech and due process.” He calls the Harvard Crimson endorsement of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanction movement an “abomination.”Too often, Mr. Dershowitz explains, it is law students who “take the lead in denying free speech and due process,” betraying the principles that they study and commit to uphold. No longer are law, medical, and business schools firewalls against undergraduate radicalism; those bounds have been breached, and pre-professionals have proved just as susceptible as freshmen. The self-described liberal Democrat worries that antisemitism from the left is “more dangerous” than its counterpart that emanates from the right because of its purchase on au courant intellectual trends and its forward-leaning veneer. Prejudice from the right is of the past, Mr. Dershowitz believes. Its progressive strain comes cloaked in the fashions of the future. Mr. Dershowitz “looks forward to voting against President Trump for the third time,” but nevertheless represented him before the Senate in his first impeachment trial. He asserts that the January 6 committee engaged in an “illegal bill of attainder,” and that the effort to “get Trump” is itself a danger to civil liberties. Turning to the looming possibility that indictments against Mr. Trump could be handed up in relation to documents found at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Dershowitz articulates a two-part test. The first is whether it meets the “Richard Nixon standard,” meaning that the president’s own party has turned on him. Second, there must be a “single standard,” i.e. Mr. Trump’s actions have to be “substantially worse than what Secretary Clinton did.” Turning to the January 6 investigation into Mr. Trump, Mr. Dershowitz “doesn’t think there is a case” even if the former president’s speech at the Oval that day was “ill advised.” He calls out his one-time colleague, Laurence Tribe, for an approach that would throw out the Constitution if it meant delivering Mr. Trump’s head on a pike. Mr. Tribe teaches constitutional law. Casting his gaze to the Supreme Court, Mr. Dershowitz rejects the notion that it is “broken,” instead urging lawmakers and citizens to “preserve it.” He predicts, and supports, the end of affirmative action in its current form, suggesting that the court will come around to the “Martin Luther King Jr. ‘I have a dream’” school of constitutional interpretation that centers character and not race. A broad approach to meritocracy is best, he believes.The Sun asked Mr. Dershowitz about New York Times v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court case from 1964 that set a high standard to prove defamation. Mr. Dershowitz first saw that case as a clerk for Justice Arthur Goldberg, who voted with the unanimous majority. Now, he concedes that the court set too high a bar for allegedly defamed plaintiffs to clear. A libel case involving Governor Palin and the Times is set to be heard before the riders of the Second Circuit. That position is personal for Mr. Dershowitz. One of Jeffrey Epstein’s accusers, Virginia Giuffre, just withdrew a lawsuit against the lawyer, alleging that she was repeatedly trafficked by Epstein to Mr. Dershowitz. The latter has maintained his innocence, and now Ms. Giuffre admits that she could have made a “mistake” due to inhabiting a “very stressful and traumatic environment.” Despite the evaporation of that allegation, Mr. Dershowitz argues that he is still feeling the ill effects of that accusation and his defense of Mr. Trump. While “real predators” should be prosecuted, he believes that “defamation has become a business model” and “MeToo has become an extortion racket” for lawyers. Other attorneys have told him they fear “being Dershowitzed.”Mr. Dershowitz takes the position that he is the “exact right person to fight back” because he “has nothing to hide.”

Alan Dershowitz Makes His Closing Argument

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