Alan Dershowitz

Alan Dershowitz is Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law Emeritus at Harvard Law School — where he was appointed the youngest full professor in the school's history at age 28 — and has been one of the most prolific and combative public defenders of Israel's legal legitimacy over five decades of public advocacy, producing a body of pro-Israel argument that spans legal scholarship, popular books, and media appearances reaching audiences that no other legal academic has matched. Born September 1, 1938, in Brooklyn, New York, into an Orthodox Jewish family in Borough Park, Dershowitz graduated from Brooklyn College in 1959 and Yale Law School in 1962, clerked for Judge David Bazelon and Justice Arthur Goldberg, and joined the Harvard faculty in 1964. His criminal defense career — representing Claus von Bülow, O.J. Simpson, Mike Tyson, and Jeffrey Epstein, among others — gave him a public profile that amplified his pro-Israel advocacy far beyond what an academic credential alone could achieve.

Dershowitz's The Case for Israel (2003) — published at the height of the Second Intifada and the campaign to have Israel's founding delegitimized in academic and human rights discourse — became the most widely read single-volume legal and historical defense of Israel's existence and conduct, selling hundreds of thousands of copies and provoking Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein into public responses that Dershowitz turned into further platforms. He won a defamation lawsuit against Finkelstein's publisher. The Case Against BDS (2018) extended the argument into the campus boycott era. Through the 2000s and 2010s, Dershowitz appeared hundreds of times on CNN, Fox News, and in the pages of the Wall Street Journal and other publications arguing the legal and moral case for Israel's military operations — in Lebanon, Gaza, and against Iranian nuclear facilities — with the authority of a constitutional lawyer who had made his career winning unpopular cases in front of skeptical audiences.

His post-October 7 advocacy continued without pause into his mid-eighties: he appeared in congressional hearings, testified on antisemitism at universities, and was among the most visible public voices demanding accountability for the Hamas attacks. Dershowitz made explicit — as he has throughout his career — that his support for Israel does not require him to agree with every Israeli government decision, a posture that has allowed him to maintain credibility with centrist and liberal audiences that would dismiss unconditional defenders. At Rank 85, Dershowitz is the lawyer who turned Israel's legal defense into a career-long public project, producing the arguments that hundreds of thousands of advocates have used, in the language — legal, combative, accessible — that courts and campuses and media audiences actually respond to.