Alan M. Dershowitz

Alan M. Dershowitz

Alan M. Dershowitz (Alan Morton Dershowitz) was born on September 1st, 1938 and is currently 87 years old. Alan M. Dershowitz was born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York, United States. Dershowitz attended Yale Law School where he received an LL.B. Bachelor of Laws and Brooklyn, College where he received an A.B. Political Science.

Alan M. Dershowitz is a lawyer and law professor that is best known for his work in criminal and US constitutional law. 
 
After Alan graduated from law school, he was a law clerk for Chief Judge David L. Bazelon of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1962 and 1963. 
 
From 1964 to 2013, he taught at Harvard Law School, where he was appointed the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law in 1993. He is a regular media contributor, political commentator, and legal analyst. 
 
He has taken on some high-profile and often unpopular clients and causes. By 2009, he’d won 13 out of the 15 murder and attempted murder cases that he had handled as a criminal appellate lawyer. Alan defended such celebrity clients as Leona Helmsley, Mike Tyson, Jim Bakker, Julian Assange, and Patty Hearst. 
 
Some major legal victories have included successful appeals that overturned convictions, first for Harry Reems in 1976 and then in 1984 for Claus von Bulow, who’d been convicted of attempting to murder Sunny, his wife. 
 
Alan served as appellate adviser on the OJ Simpson murder trial as part of OJ’s legal “Dream Team” with F. Lee Bailey and Johnnie Cochran. 
 
His book Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bulow Case was adapted into a 1990 movie called Chutzpah. 
 
In Cancel Culture: The Latest Attack on Free Speech and Due Process, Alan makes an argument for due process, free speech, and restraint against the often overeager impulse to totally cancel institutions and individuals at the ever-changing whims of social media driven crowds. 
 
Alan has come under intense criticism for his consistent and steadfast championing of defending civil liberties and individual rights, as well as his “shoe-on-the-other-foot test” for those that have been “cancelled” for any number of faults, be they imagined or real. 
 
This book is a defense of free speech, due process, and even-handedness in the application of judgment. It makes the case for care and restraint in choices about whom and what to boycott, cancel, deplatform, and bar out of public life, and offers up recommendations for why, when, and to what degree these steps might be appropriate, so long as they’re objective, fair-minded criteria are able to be determined and met. 
 
In the end, this book represents an icon in free speech’s defense and due process reckoning with the greatest challenge and threat to these rights ever since the rise of McCarthyism. It’s essential reading for anybody interested in or concerned about cancel culture and its effects on our society. 

Alan M. Dershowitz: Awards & Accolades

Dershowitz's book, Fundamental Cases was nominated for the Audie Award, Best Original Work, in 2007.

Alan M. Dershowitz: Lists & Other Mentions

• Chutzpah: #1 Nonfiction Best Seller in 1991.

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Alan M. Dershowitz: F.A.Q