Born on September 1, 1938, Alan Morton Dershowitz is an American lawyer who graduated from Brooklyn College and Yale Law School. After serving as law clerk for Judge David Bazelon and Justice Arthur Goldberg, he joined the Harvard Law School faculty at a relatively early age, holding the record as the youngest person to become a law professor in the law school’s history. In 1993, Dershowitz was appointed the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard.

Dershowitx gained prominence for representing high-profile clients such as socialite Claus von Bülow, athlete O.J. Simpson, boxer Mike Tyson, overthrown Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos, evangelist Jim Bakker, porn star Harry Reems, Patricia Hearst, and Leona Helmsley. Because of his remarkable expertise on the criminal justice system and his brave advocacy for civil liberties, Alan Dershowitz has been called by Newsweek as the “most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer” of the United States, as well as one of the nation’s “most distinguished defenders of individual rights.” Dubbed by Corriere della Sera as “America’s most famous progressive lawyer,” Dershowitz has also been recognized as “the top lawyer of last resort,” “the best-known criminal lawyer in the world,” “Israel’s single most visible defender – the Jewish state’s lead attorney in the court of public opinion,” and “America’s most public Jewish defender.”

The case that conceivably first brought Alan Dershowitz to media attention was his representation of Claus von Bülow, a British socialite who was accused of the attempted murder of his wife Sunny through administering an overdose of insulin in 1980. Bülow was convicted in 1982. Hiring Dershowitz as his criminal appellate lawyer, Bülow appealed and the case was overturned in 1984. Claus von Bülow was then found not guilty on all charges in his second trial. After which, Dershowitz wrote the book Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bülow Case, which was eventually adapted into a movie, Reversal of Fortune in 1990.

In 1995, Dershowitz was part of the defense team, being the appellate advisor, in the highly publicized criminal trial of O.J. Simpson for the murder of Nicole Simpson, his ex-wife, and Ronald Goldman, Nicole Simpson’s friend.

Apart from being a powerful lawyer, Alan Dershowitz is also a prolific writer, having authored more than 20 books and published over 100 articles in prestigious magazines and journals including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.