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Alan Dershowitz

b. 1938 Specialist

The Brooklyn prodigy who became Harvard Law's youngest full professor

Portrait of Alan Dershowitz — news.flcourts.gov — 2024-02-07 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Alan Dershowitz was born September 1, 1938, and grew up in Borough Park, Brooklyn, in an Orthodox Jewish household where his father helped found the local synagogue and sat on school boards. He was, by his own account, an indifferent student at Yeshiva University High School who did not take himself seriously as a scholar until college. At Brooklyn College he graduated magna cum laude in political science in 1959, then went to Yale Law School and finished first in his class in 1962 as editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. Two clerkships followed: a year with Chief Judge David Bazelon on the D.C. Circuit, then a year, 1963 to 1964, clerking for Justice Arthur Goldberg on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Dershowitz joined the Harvard Law faculty in 1964 and became a full professor in 1967, at 28, the youngest in the school's history — he held the Felix Frankfurter chair from 1993 until his retirement in 2013. Alongside the classroom he built one of the most recognized appellate practices in the country, representing clients few colleagues wanted: pornography actor Harry Reems in 1976, socialite Claus von Bülow, whose overturned murder conviction became his book and the film Reversal of Fortune, O. J. Simpson's defense team on appeal in 1995, Harvey Weinstein as a legal consultant in 2018, and Donald Trump's defense during his first Senate impeachment trial in 2020. He has published more than fifty books arguing constitutional law and civil liberties to a popular audience as much as a legal one.

His most consequential case was also the one that followed him hardest. Dershowitz represented Jeffrey Epstein starting in 2005 and helped negotiate the 2008 non-prosecution agreement under which Epstein served 18 months on state charges, an outcome critics call one of the most lenient plea deals ever given a sex offender. In 2019 Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre sued Dershowitz for defamation, alleging he was among the men Epstein trafficked her to — Dershowitz denied it and countersued, accusing Giuffre's attorney, David Boies, of orchestrating an extortion scheme. Both suits ended the same way in November 2022, in a mutual, unpaid dismissal, with Giuffre saying she 'may have made a mistake in identifying' him and Dershowitz withdrawing his own accusation against Boies. No money changed hands, and neither side got the vindication it had been seeking in court.

At 87, Dershowitz is still arguing, in print and on television, for causes that keep switching his allies. He left the Democratic Party in 2024 after nearly 65 years, citing hostility toward Jewish members, and registered Republican in April 2026, while continuing to defend Trump's legal positions on constitutional grounds he insists are separable from politics. A defamation suit he filed against CNN went against him in 2023, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to revive it in June 2026. Whether history settles on him as a constitutional scholar, a defense lawyer willing to represent anyone, or the professor whose name stays permanently attached to Epstein's case is not a question anyone, including Dershowitz, has resolved.

Lifespan

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Alan Dershowitz's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

Notable works

Reversal of Fortune book
Account of the Claus von Bülow appeal, later a film 1985
Chutzpah book 1991
The Case for Israel book
Subject of plagiarism allegations later investigated and cleared by Harvard 2003
Von Bülow v. Rhode Island appeal case
Overturned attempted-murder conviction 1984

Life in brief

with age at each point

September 1, 1938 aged 0 Born in Brooklyn, New York
1962 aged ~24 Graduates first in his class at Yale Law School
1964 aged ~26 Joins the Harvard Law School faculty
1967 aged ~29 Becomes a full professor at 28, the youngest in Harvard Law's history
1984 aged ~46 Wins the appeal overturning Claus von Bülow's conviction
2008 aged ~70 Helps negotiate Jeffrey Epstein's non-prosecution agreement
April 2019 aged 80 Virginia Giuffre files a defamation suit against him
November 2022 aged 84 The Giuffre suit and his countersuit are dismissed by mutual agreement
April 20, 2026 aged 87 Registers as a Republican after leaving the Democratic Party in 2024