Alan Dershowitz calls his new book his “magnum opus.”
It’s the culmination of the legendary legal mind’s 60-year career — and he’s written nearly that many books.
But though he’s had multiple bestsellers, including one atop The New York Times list, America’s most famous lawyer worries people won’t read this tome.
Blame Donald Trump — it’s a popular pastime these days.
Remember the 2002 Tom Cruise sci-fi thriller “Minority Report”?
“The Preventive State: The Challenge of Preventing Serious Harms While Preserving Essential Liberties” is the new book version, its author tells The Post in an exclusive interview.
Walking into his Manhattan apartment and seeing a framed Benjamin Franklin letter on the wall, one immediately recalls the founder’s famous line: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
“That’s the theme of my book,” Dershowitz says.
“There’s no free lunch, and every time we act to prevent great harms, we take away a little liberty. There’s no doubt about that. There’s always going to be a trade-off. And the key is to make the trade-off based on principles. And it’s OK, as I say in the book, to give up a little inessential liberty to gain a lot of security but not to give up basic liberties to gain a small amount of security. We do too much of the latter and not enough of the former. And so what I’ve tried to do is create a jurisprudence which weighs when it’s proper and when it’s not proper to take preventive actions and erring always on the side of liberty rather than security but giving weight to security.”
It’s a colossal and contentious topic. “I have been writing and teaching about ‘the preventive state’ (a phrase I coined during my teaching in the 1960s) over my entire career,” Dershowitz writes.
“So finally, after all these years, at 86 I decided to put it all together into one book,” he tells The Post. That’s after challenging others to do it at the end of a 2008 book.
“I wasn’t ready. I didn’t have the answer. I had the problem, but I didn’t have the solution,” he explains. “I really had to have the time to work through, and I finally created a jurisprudence. Now I’ve figured out how to solve these problems.”
And these problems constantly arise.
“Why do we deport people? To prevent them from committing crimes. Why are we thinking about bombing Iran? To prevent them from developing a nuclear weapon. Why did we require people to wear masks and be inoculated during COVID? To prevent it from spreading. Why do we lock people up pending trial? To prevent them from fleeing or committing crimes. So prevention runs through our legal system, but there’s no systematic attempt to either define it or create a jurisprudence. That’s what I’ve done.”
It’s the career capstone of the man who at 28 became the youngest-ever Harvard law professor granted tenure.
“I’m hoping this book will have an impact on legislators, on courts. It’s the most important book I’ve ever written. It’ll be probably the least recognized because of the cancellation issue. But if I’m going to be remembered 50 years from now, it’s going to be because of this book,” he says. “I was the first academic to basically discover prevention and start writing about it, 60 years ago, and now I’m the first academic to write a major whole book on this.”
That’s a bold statement from someone whose work has created a seemingly unceasing supply of memorable moments. His bestselling 1985 book “Reversal of Fortune” was turned into a 1990 film that earned Jeremy Irons an Oscar for his portrayal of Dershowitz’s client Claus von Bülow, who was acquitted on appeal of attempting to murder his wife, Sunny, played by Glenn Close.
Dersh approves Ron Silver’s portrayal of him — mostly. “He was very, very, very good. The only thing I objected to is as a kid, I was a really, really good basketball player. I played Madison Square Garden. I guarded Ralphie Lifshitz, who became Ralph Lauren.” Silver’s dribbles were dreadful.
Of course, a place in Hollywood history doesn’t exempt one from cancel culture. Dershowitz himself brings it up.
“I’ve written 57 books. The vast majority of them were reviewed by The New York Times. I had seven New York Times bestsellers. One a front-page number-one bestseller, ‘Chutzpah.’ Since I defended Donald Trump, The New York Times will not review my books,” he says. “They will not review this book.”
A lifelong Democrat until last year’s party convention featured Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Bernie Sanders “and all those rabid antisemites,” Dershowitz supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 — but joined Trump’s legal team in January 2020, defending the president in his first impeachment trial, without payment.
The Gray Lady isn’t the only institution that’s canceled him. The historic Temple Emanu-El has too, despite Dershowitz’s prolific work supporting Israel and Jews. The 92nd Street Y “won’t allow me to speak, even though I used to draw the biggest crowds,” he says. “If you’ve defended Trump, you can’t speak. You can’t be part of the mainstream.”
It’s even gotten personal. “I used to have a good relationship with Chuck Schumer. He doesn’t in any way talk to me anymore. He used to confer with me about cases,” he reveals. “My former students, people like Jamie Raskin, they used to always confer with me, but not since I defended Donald Trump. Martha’s Vineyard, people stopped talking to me. Wouldn’t allow me to speak in the library. Wouldn’t allow me to speak at the Jewish center. The synagogue in Martha’s Vineyard wouldn’t allow me to speak there about Israel or anything else. So what do you think we did? We fought back. We founded our own synagogue on Martha’s Vineyard” — “which now has more people going than the synagogue that banned me.”
He continues, “Barack Obama invited me to the White House, invited me to the Oval Office, invited me on Martha’s Vineyard. Well, now he won’t.” Personal friends like comedian Larry David also quit speaking to him after the Trump defense.
Is he certain it’s all about the liberal bête noire now occupying the Oval Office? Dershowitz worked on the late financier Jeffrey Epstein’s first criminal case over victimizing underage girls — and one, Virginia Giuffre, claimed the lawyer abused her. She eventually walked back that claim, which he wrote about in The Post.
“It all started before Jeffrey Epstein. It started with Trump. And the Jeffrey Epstein thing, when it happened, never had any effect on me, on Martha’s Vineyard, especially now that I’ve been, of course, exonerated,” he says.
Dershowitz’s banishment for defending a president from impeachment comes after a lifetime of defending unpopular clients — including accused murderers.
“O.J. Simpson, Claus von Bülow, Leona Helmsley, you name it. I defended Nazis marching through Skokie,” he says. “And that’s never been a problem. I defended Bill Clinton. I defended Ted Kennedy for driving a car off the bridge, and nobody objected to that. And that was the Vineyard. That was the first time I ever set foot on Martha’s Vineyard. I’ll tell you a wonderful story about that.”
He was seated next to Ted’s niece Caroline at a dinner party a few years ago. “Caroline Kennedy looks at me when I sit down and says, ‘I’m polite, so I’m not going to get up and leave, but if I knew that you had been invited, I never would have come to this dinner party. This was right after I defended Trump. So I said to her, ‘Is this because I defended Trump?’ She said, ‘Absolutely.’ I said, ‘But I defended Ted Kennedy, your uncle. Did you object to that?’ And she walked away,” he recalls. “I’ve had 18 murder cases, and I’ve won 15 of the 18 murder cases. Not all of them have been innocent, I can tell you that right now, not all of them have been innocent. And nobody objected. It was only Donald.”
Yet Dershowitz’s influence cannot be denied — besides the signal lawsuits, his students have been making their own history in powerful positions, from NYPD commissioner (Jessica Tisch) to secretary of state (Mike Pompeo). Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan would sit next to CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin in Cambridge. “They flirted with each other all the time,” Dersh reveals. “They were too cute with each other in class.”
The Harvard professor emeritus says, “I love teaching, but when I turned 75 I decided I want a new career. I figured at that time I have 10 good years left — it’s been 11 so far — I wanted to do something different. And so I am.”
What is that new career? “Provocateur. I love that word,” he immediately responds. He adds he’s a “meritocratic egalitarian, constitutional libertarian and constructive contrarian” — and even a “classical liberal.”
His insights in “The Preventive State” aren’t limited to law; the book is filled with economics, philosophy and politics too — just like his apartment. He has an early copy Congress made of the Declaration of Independence, with all the original signers and letters by Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, John Stuart Mill and many others.
“This is my most valuable letter. It’s signed by George Washington. It’s written to the troops in the middle of the Revolutionary War. But the text was not written by George Washington. It was written by his obscure secretary named Alexander Hamilton,” he chuckles. “It talks about how all soldiers have to get inoculated against smallpox.” America has been a preventive state since the beginning.
“Just good stuff,” the genial writer concludes after proudly showing part of his collection. “It inspires me every day.”
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