Attorney Alan Dershowitz rejects the notion that he is a media hog.
Yet the Harvard professor is one of America's most visible lawyers, appearing regularly on television as a legal pundit and authority.
"I don't think I've ever called the media for anything," Dershowitz said, "They call me, and I respond... It's a paradox and an irony that the media which are constantly calling me then [are] portraying me as somebody who is too interested in talking to the media. It's a fair point because the media do cover me a lot, and therefore it's easy to ask, 'Is it something I'm seeking?'"
Nevertheless, Dershowitz tries to accommodate the media's requests, because he thinks lawyers should be more available to the public through the press.
"I think we need to demystify the way law is practiced, and I'm proud of the fact that I've helped bring the law to the public and made it more accessible to average people... I'm a teacher and an educator, and I strongly believe in trying to get my message across," he said.
Dershowitz, who has been a professor for almost 30 years, has important advice for the up to 23 percent of graduating seniors who will go to law school within two years of leaving the University. Many may find it financially compelling to concentrate on more lucrative fields of law. But Dershowitz recommends a balanced career, a good fraction of which should include criminal and civil-rights law. He spends half his time on pro bono cases, he said.
"It's very important for lawyers to devote time to protecting the rights of the downtrodden," Dershowitz said. These fields "aren't as predictably lucrative, [but] you can do well and do good if you carve out your own career."
A Brooklyn native, Dershowitz graduated first in his class from Yale Law School. In 1967, at the age of 28, he became the youngest full professor ever named at Harvard University. He is currently the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, specializing in criminal law and First Amendment rights. An immensely popular teacher in the classroom, Dershowitz is devoted to his students. In his opinion, teaching should not take a back seat to scholarship in the academic tenure process.
"The best teachers are those who have a mixture of writing, practice and teaching skills... an appropriate balance has to be struck among the three aspects of the legal profession, practice, teaching and writing."
"In my experience, most good scholars are good teachers. At Harvard, certainly there's been a great correlation, and we don't have too many situations of people who are great scholars and who aren't great teachers or vice versa."
Dershowitz regards his colleague Cornel West in high esteem. A professor in Harvard's Afro-American Studies department, West spoke in Page Auditorium last Thursday. But Dershowitz is not as giving towards Dinesh D'Souza, the conservative author of "The End of Racism" who preceded West with a speech on Tuesday.
"I like Cornel-he's a wonderful addition to Harvard," Dershowitz said. "I think Dinesh is a kind of rigid ideologue who's very smart but who often takes arguments to their illogical conclusions."
Dershowitz perceives a national climate increasingly receptive to D'Souza's book, which encourages the abolishment of affirmative action. A supporter of the program, Dershowitz thinks the increase in opposition is because the issue has "been debated in extremes... in either no effort to try to undo a past history of racism or rigid racial quotas.
"I think neither is the right approach," he said. "We should have a middle ground approach in which affirmative action is seen in broader terms than simply race and gender."
The intersection of race and gender is, in Dershowitz's opinion, the biggest issue that arose from the trial of football star and celebrity O.J. Simpson, who was acquitted of two counts of murder.
Although he was a member of Simpson's defense team, Dershowitz said that he was always more interested in the social and political issues brought up by the case. One issue of particular interest to him was the perception of the case by black women. Many of them are more prepared to see the case through race and the prism of police misconduct and perjury rather than spousal abuse, he said.
"For many black women, race is a more salient identifying characteristic than gender because they have experienced discrimination more as a result of their race," Dershowitz said. "For most white women, the source of prejudice against them has been their gender, so its an understandable difference. The Hill-Thomas confrontation several years ago demonstrated the same thing."
The prominent appellate lawyer, described by Newsweek as "one of the most distinguished defenders of individual rights," Dershowitz has a long list of clients that reads like a who's who of business, sports, high society and law. Michael Milken, Mike Tyson, Claus von Bulow and the late civil rights attorney William Kuntsler have all sought his legal services. But his most famous or infamous client must surely be Simpson.
The professor hopes that as a result of that trial, certain changes will be made to the legal system. Among them are modifications designed to make it both easier and mandatory to serve jury duty. "No more excuses for getting out of juries," he said. "The people who are complaining about juries, let them serve on juries."
He also hopes that another major change comes in the wake of the Simpson trial. "The second most important change is that police have to stop lying... I think they were prepared to tamper with evidence, and they were caught," he said.
Dershowitz has been criticized in the past for his vocal stand against police perjury. But he does foresee major alterations to occur as more people in law enforcement admit to the problem. Although he points out a racial disparity in perceptions of police misconduct, Dershowitz said the main motivation to "testi-lie," the practice of lying on the witness stand, is not racism, but the exclusionary rule which protects the rights of criminal suspects.
"Police believe that unless they lie that evidence will be excluded," Dershowitz said. "Some of it does come from racism, [but] I've never seen any racial difference in 'testilying.'"
Dershowitz, an avid Boston Celtics fan, said that having made his name in law, only one ambition remains important to him. "I'd love to be the point guard for the Celts," he said, "but they just won't give me a tryout. I sit next to the owners, I ask them all the time. I would settle for assistant coach, but other than a life in sports, there's nothing else I would like to do."
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