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Alan Dershowitz Retires From Harvard Law

It was 1964. Lyndon Johnson had unleashed a war on poverty while shepherding the Civil Rights Act through Congress. Teenagers squealed as The Fab Four rocked The Ed Sullivan Show. And Americans weren’t quite sure where Barry Goldwater ended and Dr. Strangelove began.
It was during this time – when cigarettes were suddenly cancer-causing and South Vietnam was still just an insurgency – that Alan Dershowitz joined the Harvard Law School faculty… at the tender age of 25.
Fast forward to 2013 – and what a difference 50 years makes! But one constant remained: Alan Dershowitz was still teaching Harvard Law’s best and brightest. That is, until this fall semester ended. Having worked with students ranging from Senator Ted Cruz to actress Natalie Portman, Dershowitz is stepping down after teaching “10,000 students over the course of 100 semesters” (including many fellow faculty members).
Of course, stepping down is not necessarily the same as slowing down. According to The Boston Globe, Dershowitz intends to continue working on legal cases and writing books (he has published 30). What’s more, Dershowitz sees his decision as a “career change,” noting that he has “done what I’ve wanted to do, I’ve written the books I’ve wanted to write, I’ve taught the classes I’ve wanted to teach.”
Oh, but what a 50 years it was! The Harvard Crimson described him as a “lightning rod”… and not without reason. To his critics on the right, he was a flaming liberal. To left-leaning academics like Noam Chomsky, Dershowitz was “strongly opposed to civil liberties.” Even libertarian Glenn Greenwald referred to him as “deranged.” In short, a person’s view of Dershowitz was the ultimate Rorschach Test.
And why not? He has defended torture in limited use, while also arguing that pornography was protected under the first amendment and not harmful. As a criminal attorney, he “consistently defended the rights of the least popular citizens of the United States of America,” in the words of Boston attorney Martin G. Weinberg. And those disgraced figures included the likes of Patty Hearst, Claus von Bulow, Leona Helmsley, and Michael Milken. Even more, his take-no-prisoners style could alienate critics and advocates alike. Still, no one could question his courage for taking unpopular stands on the era’s hot button issues.
In the end, Dershowitz will be best known as a teacher. Like the best teachers, Dershowitz would draw heavily from his experience. He loved students who challenged him and would “push them very, very hard.” More important, he wanted to teach students how to think instead of what to think. Recently, pundits have snickered at how the left-leaning Dershowitz once taught conservative Senator Ted Cruz. However, Dershowitz had little interest in ideology:
“I don’t want to influence Ted Cruz to become more liberal. I want to teach him to have better analytic skills that will make him a better conservative… I think the worst professors are those who use their captive audiences to persuade them of their own ideology or perspectives.”
Spoken like a true descendent of Socrates. Dershowitz will be missed.
Source: Boston Globe, The Harvard Crimson