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Dershowitz has been contentious since his boyhood in Brooklyn's Boro Park section, but his intellectual powers were rarely applied to schoolwork. "You know, Alan," said his high school principal once, "you're very dumb, but you're very verbal. The only thing you can be is a lawyer." At Brooklyn College, Dershowitz suddenly became a serious student. He went on to Yale Law School, where he had what he calls "my first experience with anti-Semitism." The top student in his class, he applied to 32 Wall Street firms for a summer job—and got 32 rejections.
Harvard Law School had a different view. Impressed by Dershowitz's writing in the Yale Law Journal, which he headed, Harvard representatives asked him during his second year to consider joining their faculty after graduating. Dershowitz first clerked for U.S. Appeals Court Judge David Bazelon and Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg. Then, at 25, he took the Harvard offer and at 28 became the youngest full professor in the school's history. Most students give him high marks as a teacher, though he has his share of detractors. Alluding to the professor's well-developed ego, one former student complains: "The course name should be changed from 'Criminal Law' to 'Alan Dershowitz—This Is Your Life.'" Dershowitz has also produced a broad array of legal writing, showing a special interest in psychiatry and law, though his work is not universally acclaimed. Says the dean of another law school: "It is more popular than scholarly."
Perhaps that is because he has been unable to resist opportunities to practice what he teaches. The first came in 1972. His client: a Boro Park contemporary facing murder charges after having made a bomb for the Jewish Defense League. Dershowitz eventually got his client off and began taking on other legal lepers. Now he laughingly asks, "Who else do you know who gets Christmas cards from murderers, rapists and residents of death row?" Not everyone is amused, not even in his own Boro Park, where one neighbor recently described him as "the one who used to be the troublemaker, and now is the lawyer for the troublemakers."
His critics contend that Dershowitz—advocate, teacher, author—has spread himself too thin. He strongly disagrees. Almost as if to prove his ability to budget time effectively, Dershowitz maintains a busy personal life that includes attending home games of his beloved Boston Celtics and making regular trips to the opera in Manhattan. In the 1970s, after being divorced and successfully fighting to gain custody of his two adolescent sons, Dershowitz would rush home every afternoon to cook the boys' supper. Rearing them, he says, was "the most gratifying" thing he has ever done. Now that both are away at college, he is ready for a new stage in his life. Perhaps a judgeship? "It would be too constraining," says Dershowitz. "It's like asking someone actively involved in sports if he wants to be an umpire." Not even a Supreme Court appointment? "I have never done anything in my life to encourage that." —By Bennett H. Beach. Reported by John E. Yang/Boston