Alan Morton Dershowitz ( ; born September 1, 1938) is an American lawyer and law professor known for his work in U.S. constitutional and criminal law. From 1964 to 2013, he taught at Harvard Law School, where he was appointed as the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law in 1993. Dershowitz is a regular media contributor, political commentator, and legal analyst.
Dershowitz has taken on high-profile and often unpopular causes and clients. As of 2009, he had won 13 of the 15 murder and attempted murder cases he handled as a criminal appellate lawyer. Dershowitz has represented such celebrity clients as Mike Tyson, Patty Hearst, Leona Helmsley, Julian Assange, and Jim Bakker. Major legal victories have included two successful appeals that overturned convictions, first for Harry Reems in 1976, then in 1984 for Claus von Bülow, who had been convicted of the attempted murder of his wife, Sunny. In 1995, Dershowitz served as the appellate adviser on the murder trial of O. J. Simpson as part of the legal "Dream Team" alongside Johnnie Cochran and F. Lee Bailey. He was a member of Harvey Weinstein's defense team in 2018 and of President Donald Trump's defense team in his first impeachment trial in 2020. He was a member of Jeffrey Epstein's defense team and helped to negotiate a controversial non-prosecution agreement on Epstein's behalf.
Dershowitz is the author of several books about politics and the law, including Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bülow Case (1985), the basis of the 1990 film; Chutzpah (1991); Reasonable Doubts: The Criminal Justice System and the O. J. Simpson Case (1996); The Case for Israel (2003); and The Case for Peace (2005). His two most recent works are The Case Against Impeaching Trump (2018) and Guilt by Accusation: The Challenge of Proving Innocence in the Age of #MeToo (2019). An ardent supporter of Israel, he has written several books on the Arab–Israeli conflict.
Early life and education Dershowitz was born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on September 1, 1938, the son of Claire (née Ringel) and Harry Dershowitz, an Orthodox Jewish couple. He was raised in Borough Park.Dershowitz, Alan M. Chutzpah. Touchstone Books, 1992, pp. 35, 41. His father was a founder and president of the Young Israel of Boro Park Synagogue in the 1960s, served on the board of directors of the Etz Chaim School in Borough Park, and, in retirement, was co-owner of the Manhattan-based Merit Sales Company.Smith, Dinitia. "Trying to save Leona" , New York magazine, March 12, 1990, pp. 28–35. Dershowitz's first job was at a deli factory on Manhattan's Lower East Side in 1952, at age 14.
Dershowitz attended the Brooklyn Talmudical Academy, then the Brooklyn branch of Yeshiva University High School, from which he graduated in 1955. He played on its basketball team. He was a rebellious student, often criticized by his teachers. He later said his teachers told him to do something that "requires a big mouth and no brain ... so I became a lawyer". After graduating from high school, he studied political science at Brooklyn College, graduating in 1959 with a Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude. He then attended Yale Law School, where he became the editor-in-chief of The Yale Law Journal. He graduated in 1962 ranked first in his class with a Bachelor of Laws.Dershowitz, Alan. "Biographical Statement" . AlanDershowitz.com, accessed November 20, 2010. Also see "Alan M. Dershowitz" , Harvard Law School, accessed November 20, 2010. In 1997 he was a member of a Conservative minyan at Harvard Hillel but was a secular Jew.
Legal and teaching career
After graduating from law school, Dershowitz was a law clerk for Chief Judge David L. Bazelon of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1962 to 1963. Dershowitz described Bazelon as an influential mentor. He has said, "Bazelon was my best and worst boss at once.... He worked me to the bone; he didn't hesitate to call at 2 a.m. He taught me everything—how to be a civil libertarian, a Jewish activist, a mensch. He was halfway between a slave master and a father figure." From 1963 to 1964 Dershowitz clerked for the Justice Arthur Goldberg of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Dershowitz told Tom Van Riper of Forbes that getting a Supreme Court clerkship was probably his second big break. His first was at age 14 or 15, when a camp counselor told him he was smart but that his mind operated a little differently. He joined the Harvard Law School faculty as an assistant professor in 1964, and was made a full professor in 1967 at age 28, at that time the youngest full professor of law in the school's history.Spero, Josh. "No stranger to controversy, Dershowitz remains unapologetic" , The Times, March 14, 2006. He was appointed as the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law in 1993. Dershowitz retired from teaching at Harvard Law in 2013. He is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute. Throughout his tenure at Harvard, Dershowitz maintained his legal practice in both criminal and civil law.
Notable clients Dershowitz's clients have included such high-profile figures as Patty Hearst, Leona Helmsley, Jim Bakker, Mike Tyson, Michael Milken, O. J. Simpson, Kirtanananda Swami, Jeffrey Epstein, and Donald Trump.
Harry Reems (1976) In 1976, Dershowitz handled the successful appeal of Harry Reems, who had been convicted of distribution of obscenity resulting from acting in the pornographic movie Deep Throat. Dershowitz argued against censorship of pornography on First Amendment grounds and maintained that consumption of pornography was not harmful.
Claus von Bülow (1984)
In one of his first high-profile cases, Dershowitz represented Claus von Bülow, a British socialite, on appeal for the attempted murder of his wife, Sunny von Bülow, who went into a coma in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1980 (and later died in 2008). He succeeded in having the conviction overturned, and von Bülow was acquitted in a retrial.State v. von Bulow, 475 A.2d 995 (R.I. 1984). Dershowitz told the story of the case in his book Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bülow case (1985), which was adapted into a movie in 1990. Dershowitz was played by actor Ron Silver, and Dershowitz himself had a cameo as a judge.
In his book Taking the Stand, Dershowitz recounts that von Bülow had a dinner party after he was found not guilty at his retrial. Dershowitz told him that he would not attend if it was a "victory party," and von Bülow assured him that it was only a dinner for "several interesting friends." Norman Mailer attended the dinner where, among other things, Dershowitz explained why the evidence pointed to von Bülow's innocence. Dershowitz described Mailer grabbing his wife's arm and saying: "Let's get out of here. I think this guy is innocent. I thought we were going to be having dinner with a man who actually tried to kill his wife. This is boring."
Avi Weiss (1989) In 1989, Dershowitz filed a defamation suit against Cardinal Józef Glemp, then Archbishop of Warsaw, on behalf of Rabbi Avi Weiss. That summer, Weiss and six other members of New York's Jewish community had staged a protest at the Auschwitz concentration camp over the presence of a controversial convent of Carmelite nuns. Weiss and the protesters were ejected after attempting to scale a wall surrounding the convent. In an August 1989 speech, Glemp referenced the incident and ascribed a violent intent to the protesters, saying, "Recently, a squad of seven Jews from New York launched an attack on the convent at Oswiecim [Auschwitz]. They did not kill the nuns or destroy the convent only because they were stopped." In the same speech, Glemp made antisemitic remarks suggesting that Jews control the news media. The lawsuit centered on these statements. His account of the lawsuit appears in his 1991 book Chutzpah.Dershowitz, Alan. Chutzpah. Simon & Schuster, 1992, pp. 152ff
Kirtanananda Swami (1990) In 1990, the federal government indicted Kīrtanānanda Swami on five counts of racketeering, six counts of mail fraud, and conspiracy to murder two of his opponents in the Hare Krishna movement (Stephen Bryant and Charles St. Denis). The government claimed that Kīrtanānanda had illegally amassed a profit of more than $10.5 million over four years. It also charged that he ordered the killings because the victims had threatened to reveal his sexual abuse of minors.Holy Cow, Swami, a documentary movie by Jacob Young (WVEBA, 1996)
On March 29, 1991, Kīrtanānanda was convicted on nine of the 11 charges (the jury failed to reach a verdict on the murder charges), but the Court of Appeals was convinced by Dershowitz's defense and threw out the convictions, saying that child molestation evidence had unfairly prejudiced the jury against Kīrtanānanda, who was not charged with those crimes.
O. J. Simpson (1995)
During the murder trial of O. J. Simpson, Dershowitz acted as an appellate adviser to Simpson's defense team, and later wrote a book about it, Reasonable Doubts: The Criminal Justice System and the O. J. Simpson Case (1996). Dershowitz wrote: "the Simpson case will not be remembered in the next century. It will not rank as one of the trials of the century. It will not rank with the Nuremberg trials, the Rosenberg trial, Sacco and Vanzetti. It is on par with Leopold and Loeb and the Lindbergh case, all involving celebrities. It is also not one of the most important cases of my own career. I would rank it somewhere in the middle in terms of interest and importance."Alan Dershowitz: Looking back at the OJ trial , Time, Court TV transcript. June 9, 1999. The case has been described as the most publicized criminal trial in American history.
Jeffrey Epstein (2008) Dershowitz was a member of the legal defense team for the first criminal case against Jeffrey Epstein, who was investigated after accusations that he had repeatedly solicited sex from minors. Dershowitz had previously befriended Epstein through their mutual acquaintance Lynn Forester de Rothschild.
In 2006, Dershowitz was involved in efforts to discredit Epstein's young accusers.
The first investigation into Epstein concluded with a controversial non-prosecution agreement that Dershowitz helped negotiate; in June 2008, Epstein pleaded guilty to a state charge of procuring for prostitution a girl under age 18 and was sentenced to 18 months in prison. The agreement had been approved by Alexander Acosta, then the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida. In February 2019, Judge Kenneth Marra ruled that federal prosecutors had violated the Crime Victims' Rights Act by concluding the agreement without notifying Epstein's victims. In 2021 the Eleventh Circuit, sitting en banc, denied a victim's petition asserting that prosecutors had violated her rights under the Act, holding that it provides no judicial remedy before formal charges are filed.
In 2018 Dershowitz claimed to have broken off social contact with Epstein while still giving him legal advice.
In April 2019, Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre filed a federal civil defamation lawsuit against Dershowitz in New York. It was dismissed on November 8, 2022, and no fees were awarded to either side.
In 2025, Dershowitz said he was aware of the names associated with the Epstein list but was bound by confidentiality. It was reported that he had contributed a mocked-up fictional excerpt from Vanity Fair magazine to Jeffrey Epstein's 2003 birthday book. According to Bloomberg, Epstein gave Dershowitz's wife a new Lexus as a gift. Dershowitz said this was part of his legal fee, as his wife would drive Epstein around.