Alan Dershowitz

Biography
Alan Morton Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He is known for his work as an attorney in several high-profile cases, support for Zionism and Israel and his defence of torture. Dershowitz has been criticized for shoddy scholarship and plagiarism by people both on the left and the right.


 * Honorary Director, Prostate Cancer Foundation

The Case for Israel
In 2003, after the publication of the book The Case for Israel, Norman Finkelstein accused Dershowitz, of "fraud, falsification, plagiarism and nonsense." Finkelstein noted that in twenty instances that all occur within about as many pages, Dershowitz's book excerpts the same words from the same sources that Joan Peters used in her book From Time Immemorial, a book about the history of Israel that was recognized as a hoax by serious scholars in the US, and the UK as well as Israel. Several paragraph-long quotes that the two books share have ellipses in the same position, Finkelstein pointed out; and in one instance Dershowitz referenced the same page number as Peters, although he was citing a different edition of the source, in which the words appear on a different page.

In another instance, Finkelstein points out:


 * On a note both humorous and pathetic, Peters, in From Time Immemorial, claiming to be inspired by George Orwell, coins the term "turnspeak" to signal the inversion of reality (pp. 173, 402). Dershowitz, apparently confounded by his massive borrowings from Peters, credits the term "turnspeak" to Orwell, accusing critics of Israel of "deliberately using George Orwell's 'turnspeak'" (p. 57) and "Orwellian turnspeak" (p. 153). Is this scandalous scholarship, or is it plagiarism, or is it both?

A history of distortions
Omar Baddar, a political scientist and human rights activist, documents many distortions and shoddy/selective use of quotations for cheap political/propaganda purposes. For example, Dershowitz distorts Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's statement about Iran's right to develop nuclear technology for peaceful purposes into a "nuclear weapons program".

Publications

 * 2005: The Case for Peace : How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Can be Resolved
 * 2004: Rights From Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights
 * 2004: America on Trial: Inside the Legal Battles That Transformed Our Nation--From the Salem Witches to the Guantanamo Detainees
 * 2003: America Declares Independence
 * 2003: The Case for Israel
 * 2002: Shouting Fire: Civil Liberties in a Turbulent Age
 * 2002: Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the threat, responding to the challenge
 * 2001: Supreme Injustice: How the High Court Hijacked Election 2000
 * 2001: Letters to a Young Lawyer
 * 2000: The Genesis of Justice: ten stories of biblical injustice that led to the Ten Commandments and modern law
 * 1999: Just Revenge (fiction)
 * 1998: Sexual McCarthyism: Clinton, Starr, and the emerging constitutional crisis
 * 1997: The Vanishing American Jew: in search of Jewish identity for the next century
 * 1996: Reasonable Doubts: The Criminal Justice System and the O.J. Simpson Case
 * 1994: The Abuse Excuse: and other cop-outs, sob stories, and evasions of responsibility
 * 1994: The Advocate's Devil (fiction)
 * 1992: Contrary to Popular Opinion
 * 1991: Chutzpah
 * 1988: Taking Liberties: a decade of hard cases, bad laws, and bum raps
 * 1985: Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Balow Case
 * 1982: The Best Defense
 * 1973: In Defense of Shahak, Boston Globe

Related Links

 * Alan Dershowitz, Plagiarist, Alexander Cockburn, The Nation, October 13, 2003
 * The Rights and Wrongs of Alan Dershowitz, Hadley Arkes, Claremont Review of Books, November 4, 2005
 * Alan Dershowitz vs. Norman Finkelstein - A Debate, Democracy Now, September 24, 2003
 * Nutty Professor Screams About "Plot" Against Him, Cites Troika of Evil, Alexander Cockburn, Counterpunch, September 26, 2003
 * Alan Dershowitz Exposed: What if a Harvard Student Did This?, Norman Finkelstein
 * The Dershowitz Hoax