Alan Dershowitz
Alan Dershowitz
Alan Morton Dershowitzis an American lawyer, jurist, and author. He is a prominent scholar on United States constitutional law and criminal law, and a leading defender of civil liberties. He spent most of his career at Harvard Law School where in 1967, at the age of 28, he became the youngest full professor of law in its history. He held the Felix Frankfurter professorship there from 1993 until his retirement in December 2013...
ProfessionLawyer
Date of Birth1 September 1938
CityNew York City, NY
issues freedom-of-speech serious
All speech should be presumed to be protected by the Constitution, and a heavy burden should be placed on those who would censor to demonstrate with relative certainty that the speech at issue, if not censored, would lead to irremediable and immediate serious harm.
law agnostic ultimate-truth
The law is agnostic about truth.
numbers justice accountability
If torture is going to be administered as a last resort in the ticking-bomb case, to save enormous numbers of lives, it ought to be done openly, with accountability, with approval by the president of the United States or by a Supreme Court justice.
intolerance terrible display
When you discriminate against anyone, you discriminate against everyone. It's a display of terrible intolerance.
gun people majority
The vast majority of gun owners don't kill, but people who do kill, tend to kill with guns, and often with illegal guns.
lasts resorts court
The court of last resort is no longer the Supreme Court. It's 'Nightline.'
people insane ill
Well, many insane people and seriously mentally ill people seem very reasonable.
gun liberty protect
There's no evidence that I'm aware of that guns protect liberty.
believe defense care
If you're a prosecutor, and you believe the defendant is guilty, you only talk about ultimate truth, but not intermediate truth. If you're the defense attorney, you care deeply about intermediate truth, but you tend to neglect ultimate truth.
mean views expression
Freedom of speech means freedom for those who you despise, and freedom to express the most despicable views. It also means that the government cannot pick and choose which expressions to authorize and which to prevent.
country secret freedom-of-speech
We don't have an Official Secrets Act in the United States, as other countries do. Under the First Amendment, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of association are more important than protecting secrets.
successful thinking would-be
You can't think about terrorism without thinking about Palestinian terrorism. Palestinians began international terrorism. It started with them in 1968. They used it as the first resort, not the last resort. They invented it, they perfected it, they benefited from it and they taught the world how to use it and that it would be successful.
pride israel support
There will never be another Ed Koch. He was an original, but he represented a significant, if shrinking, segment of American Jewry who refused to compromise their liberal values, their support for Israel or their Jewish pride.
thinking law people
I think we're seeing privacy diminish, not by laws... but by young people who don't seem to value their privacy.