Thread by @KaivanShroff

Dershowitz Brings Disgrace —
@Harvard Law School should review Alan Dershowitz’s emeritus status. (Please share.)

Harvard Law School professors and alumni are no strangers to controversy – whether fighting for justice or working to undermine it.

Part of the Law School’s commitment to diversity of thought and rigorous debate includes supporting faculty under fire for challenging the status quo or defending controversial clientele.

However, the Law School also has a professional and ethical responsibility to its community – past, present, and future – to associate with faculty who are ethical and have a high regard for the law.

It is past time for the Law School to publicly re-evaluate Alan Dershowitz’s status as professor emeritus.

Although Dershowitz retired from teaching at the Law School in 2013, he continues to trade on his emeritus status in a very public manner. Just recently, he used his position at Harvard to nominate Jared Kushner and Ari Berkowitz for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The once admired law professor had also been a major proponent of Trump’s widely rebuked efforts to abuse the law in attempts to undermine our democratic elections. Many cite these efforts as the basis for the January 6, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Dershowitz is still embroiled in a national pedophilia scandal involving his former client Jeffrey Epstein.

Prior to that scandal, Dershowitz represented Epstein and secured him a secret plea deal that was later deemed illegal by a judge. Dershowitz has been accused of having sex with a minor, one of the many women trafficked by Epstein and his right-hand Ghislaine Maxwell.

Dershowitz denies the allegations, though he has admitted to getting a massage at Epstein’s house. While he says he has “no idea” if young women were around at the time, he has also oddly specified that he “kept his underwear on” during the massage.

In addition to his denial, Dershowitz has called his accuser an “admitted prostitute and a serial liar” and then victim-blamed her saying she “made her own decisions in life.”

While Dershowitz rose to prominence as a contrarian willing to provide a defense to anyone and everyone – arguably a noble endeavor – this controversy cannot be chalked up to a principled legal position. Harvard Law School owes members of its community who are survivors answers.

The Law School’s faculty page for Dershowitz attempts to whitewash the narrative on the former icon. “Professor Alan M. Dershowitz is Brooklyn native who has been called ‘the nation’s most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer‘ and…

…one of its ‘most distinguished defenders of individual rights,’ ‘the best-known criminal lawyer in the world,’” reads the first sentence. As is standard for faculty biographies, there is no mention of anything negative on the page. (hls.harvard.edu/faculty/direct…)

Harvard cannot deny, however, that in allowing Dershowitz to remain emeritus without so much as an acknowledgment of these current events, they are tacitly saying it doesn’t believe women, it doesn’t take these allegations seriously…

and it doesn’t care about Dershowitz’s, at minimum, highly unethical lawyering.

This is unacceptable given the school’s role shaping the future legal minds and demonstrating ethical practice. Worse, it sends a message to survivors across the University that credible accusations of sexual violence against a prominent professor will not be taken seriously.

Many, including Dershowitz himself, view the Epstein episode as one of many attempts by partisans to smear a Fox New legal analyst and president Trump’s former attorney.

However, Harvard’s actions are deeply inconsistent with the University’s own precedent, regardless of public opinion on the issue.

In May of 2019, Harvard College elected not to renew the appointments of Law School professor Ronald Sullivan and his wife as faculty deans because Mr. Sullivan had temporarily provided legal counsel to disgraced media mogul Harvey Weinstein.

Prior to his termination as dean, Sullivan noted, “It is not lost on me that I’m the first African-American to hold this position. Never in the history of the faculty dean position has the dean been subjected to a ‘climate review’ in the middle of some controversy.”

The Black Law Students Association expressed disagreement with the university’s decision emphasizing, “the racist undertones evidenced by the disproportionate response to this issue by the university.”

While it is understandable that there might have been a conflict between Sullivan’s duties to fully support students, including those who might feel less comfortable reporting sexual misconduct, and his role as a potential defense attorney…

for one of the most famous serial rapists in the county – it is critical to note that Mr. Sullivan himself was never accused of personal wrongdoing of any sort.

In contrast, Harvard has remained silent on Mr. Dershowitz despite the fact that it is far less consequential to remove an emeritus faculty member than to remove someone mid-career.

While Mr. Dershowitz enjoys a legal presumption of innocence, that does not give Harvard cover to let the situation go unaddressed.

(I should note Prof Sullivan was kind enough to sponsor an independent clinic I worked on through another law school so I could continue a summer parole case — our client was released! It was a pass/fail course. We corresponded only by email, exclusively for assignment purposes.)

Thanks to Newsweek for including this perspective. google.com/amp/s/www.news…