Hagiography tells only part of the story

Author Solomon Schmidt sets out his stall early in this biography of Alan Dershowitz, professor emeritus at Harvard Law School and ubiquitous pundit on all things legal. To Schmidt, a star-struck twenty-something, Dershowitz is nothing less than ‘arguably the most iconic lawyer in American history’. Never mind, Abraham Lincoln, Thurgood Marshall, Daniel Webster, Clarence Darrow and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Schmidt briskly dispenses with Dershowitz’s early life, reaching the day of his Yale Law School graduation by page 33 of the 351-page text. Most of the balance is taken up with the stories of Dershowitz’s famous cases and clients, including Claus von Bülow, OJ Simpson, Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump. Frustratingly, in the lengthy endnotes the sources are simply grouped by chapter, without individual citation in the text. As a result, one cannot fact-check any particular assertion, which could have been based upon one of Dershowitz’s own books, a YouTube video, an Encyclopedia Britannica article, or even a Wikipedia entry, all of which are voluminously present in the notes.  

Although the book purports to cover events into 2024, there is no mention of the 2023 decision of a US federal district (trial) court in Arizona which sanctioned Dershowitz and ordered him to pay a portion of the attorneys’ fees incurred by Maricopa County in defending a lawsuit brought by Dershowitz and others, challenging the voting machines used in the state’s elections.

The author apparently benefited from great access to Dershowitz, his family and friends, and his archives at Brooklyn College.

The resulting book will be of interest to anyone wishing to hear the Dershowitz view of Dershowitz.

Susan McFadden is a solicitor and US lawyer, retired from the London-based US immigration firm Gudeon & McFadden