Born: Alan Morton Dershowitz, September 1, 1938, in Brooklyn, New York.

Education: Brooklyn College (1959) and Yale Law School (1962).

Occupation: Attorney and author. From 1964 until 2013, Dershowitz was on the faculty of Harvard Law School, being appointed Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Emeritus, in 1993.

Notable Clients, Positions & Controversies

President Donald Trump

• Since Trump took office, Dershowitz has frequently defended him and his administration on cable news and elsewhere, including against charges of colluding with Russia in the 2016 election, and is one of the lawyers representing Trump at his Senate impeachment trial.
• ​​Discussing a president who faced impeachment previously, Richard Nixon, in 1974 Dershowitz told a reporter he was concerned individuals charged with crimes related to the Watergate scandal that eventually forced Nixon to resign wouldn’t get a fair trial in Washington, DC, in part because of the racial makeup of the city, stating: “I’m not happy seeing Richad Nixon’s gang being tried by blacks and liberals in the Disrict of Columbia.”

Jeffrey Epstein

• Dershowitz represented and was personal friends with the wealthy financier and convicted sex offender, who committed suicide in prison in August 2019 according to authorities. Beginning in 1996, Dershowitz frequently socialized with Epstein, including spending time at his private island in the Caribbean.​​
• Dershowitz helped Epstein get an extremely lenient and controversial sentence in a case where Epstein pled guilty to two counts of soliciting prostitution, one involving an underage girl, which would later spark outrage and lead to renewed interest and investigations into Epstein’s crimes.
• Two of the girls Epstein victimized also accused Dershowitz of abusing them. One of them said in a sworn affidavit that she was forced to have sex with Dershowitz multiple times. Dershowitz strenuously denied the accusations but admitted to receiving a massage while at Epstein’s home, claiming that it was from a “fifty-year-old Russian woman” and declaring: “I kept my underwear on.”

Harvey Weinstein

• In 2018, Dershowitz advised Harvey Weinstein's legal team in their efforts to defend the disgraced movie mogul from multiple allegations of sexual assault and harassment.   

OJ Simpson

• In 1995, Dershowitz was part of the “dream team” of high-powered lawyers who got former NFL superstar OJ Simpson acquitted of charges of brutally murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman in what was dubbed the “Trial of the Century.” Simpson would later be found guilty of wrongful death in a civil case brought by the families of the victims and ordered to pay massive punitive damages.

Claus von Bulow

• In the early 1980s, Dershowitz helped overturn the conviction of wealthy Danish-British socialite Claus von Bulow, who had been found guilty of trying to murder his wife, Martha, with insulin injections. Martha died in 2008 after spending 28 years in a coma. The case would be made into a Hollywood film that would make Dershowitz famous.

Support for Torture

• After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Dershowitz publicly lobbied the US government to institute so-called “torture warrants” for “ticking time bomb” scenarios. In particular, Dershowitz proposed inserting needles under the fingernails of prisoners, “to cause excruciating pain without endangering life,” claiming it would be humane because the needles would be sterilized.

Support for Israel

• For decades, Dershowitz has been one of Israel’s most aggressive and high-profile supporters in the US. He has frequently appeared on television and elsewhere defending Israeli human rights abuses and war crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories, including stating he would defend Israel at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. In his biography on the Harvard Law School website, he boasted of being described as “Israel’s single most visible defender – the Jewish state’s lead attorney in the court of public opinion.” 
• In 2003, Dershowitz published a book entitled, “The Case for Israel.” Critics, including political scientist Norman Finkelstein, accused Dershowitz of distortions, factual inaccuracies, and plagiarism. In response, Finkelstein published, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History.
• In 2014, Dershowitz published “Terror Tunnels: The Case for Israel's Just War Against Hamas,” just weeks after Israel ended a devastating seven-week military assault on Palestinians trapped in tiny, besieged Gaza, killing more than 2,200 people, the vast majority civilians, including more than 550 children. Rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch documented evidence of widespread war crimes committed by Israeli forces, including targeting medical personnel and UN schools sheltering civilians.
• Dershowitz has also fiercely attacked the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign for Palestinian rights, once writing an op-ed listing reasons the nonviolent grassroots human rights movement, which was inspired by the US Civil Rights and South African anti-apartheid movements, was allegedly “immoral.” He also supports legislation intended to suppress BDS in the US. Some two-dozen states have passed anti-BDS laws, mostly barring the government from investing in or contracting with companies or individuals that abide by boycotts in support of Palestinian human rights. These laws have been condemned by the ACLU and other civil liberties groups as an unconstitutional infringement on the First Amendment right to freedom of speech.