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.
Dershowitz was also a member of the "dream team" of defense lawyers working for O. J. Simpson.
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." Holocaust Survivor and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, 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 however come under fire for advocating the issuing of warrantss for the 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 many innocent lives. Many disagree with this, stating that torture is immoral, often ineffective, and highly illegal.
In the early 2000s Dershowitz was asked to leave The Last Word radio show on Ireland's Today FM when during a live phone in link he began verbally abusing journalist Robert Fisk and interrupting attempts by Fisk to speak. The presenter of the show, Eamon Dunphy, previously a fan of Dershowitz, pronounced himself "perplexed" by what he said were Dershowitz's attempts to silence someone he disagreed with. Radio listeners, many of them critics of Fisk, rang the show to complain about Dershowitz's behaviour, accusing him of "bullying" and "bigotry".
In September 2003, shortly after the publication of Dershowitz's The Case for Israel, Norman Finkelstein accused its author 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 that Finkelstein and others had criticized, harshly, for poor scholarship. See Dershowitz-Finkelstein Affair for more.
Some people have suggested that he may act as Saddam Hussein's lawyer in his forthcoming trial.
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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 links