Alan Dershowitz
Professor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School has been described by Newsweek as "the nation's most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer and on of its most distinguished defenders of individual rights." Time magazine, in addition to including him on the cover story on the "50 Faces for the Future," called him "the top lawyer of last resort in the country -- a sort of judicial St. Jude." Business Week characterized him as "a feisty civil libertarian and one of the nation's most prominent legal educators."
Professor Dershowitz's has written many books and publications. His clients have included Anatoly Shcharansky, O.J. Simpson, Claus von Bulow, Michael Milken, Jonathan Pollard, Leona Helmsley, Jim Bakker, Christian Brando, Mike Tyson, Penthouse, Senator Mike Gravel, Senator Alan Cranston, Frank Snepp, John Landis, John DeLorean, David Crosby, Dr. Peter Rosier, Wayne Williams, Fred Wiseman, Patricia Hearst, Harry Reems, Stanley Friedman, the Tison brothers, various death row inmates, Rabbi Meir Kahane, and numerous lawyers including F. Lee Bailey and William Kunstler. He has been a consultant to several presidential commissions and has testified before congressional committees on numerous occasions.
In 1983, the Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai B'rith presented him with the William O. Douglas First Amendment Award for his "compassionate eloquent leadership and persistent advocacy in the struggle for civil and human rights." In presenting the award, Nobel Lauriate Elie Wiesel said: "If there had been a few people like Alan Dershowitz during the 1930s and 1940s, the history of European Jewry might have been different." He has been awarded the honorary doctor of laws degree by Yeshiva University, the Hebrew Union College, Monmouth College, and Haifa University. The New York Criminal Bar Association honored Professor Dershowitz for his "outstanding contribution as a scholar and dedicated defender of human rights."
Alan Dershowitz 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. Since that time, he has taught courses in criminal law, psychiatry and law, constitutional litigation, civil liberties and violence, comparative criminal law, legal ethics and human rights. He has lectured throughout the country and around the world -- from Carnegie Hall to the Kremlin.