The law in a whole new light - lawyer Alan Dershowitz - Interview

Interview, Sept, 1994 by Mark Marvel

Why has the cultural fascination with the courtroom made high-profile lawyers almost as famous as the clients they defend? One of the country's leading lawmen, Alan Dershowitz, examines the evidence

Like it or not, lawyers are in the limelight. From best-selling authors to the new crop of legal commentators on television to the new stars of Court TV, they are at the center of a stage that has become a new kind of morality play--the open-book, open-door trial. As one of the pioneers in making criminal law part of the popular culture, Alan Dershowitz has expanded--as a professor at Harvard Law School, public speaker, courtroom commentator on television, and author of books like Reversal of Fortune--our understanding of and interest in how the law works. He has also provoked and participated in--with a list of clients that has included Michael Milken, Claus von Bulow, Anatoly Sharansky, Leona Helmsley, Jim Bakker, Mike Tyson, Mia Farrow, and numerous pro bono clients, several of whom are on death row, and now as a legal consultant to Robert L. Shapiro in the O. J. Simpson case--some of the greatest legal and cultural debates in these trying times. With Dershowitz's latest right-on-time book, The Abuse Excuse: And Other Cop-Outs, Sob Stories, and Evasions of Responsibility, to be published soon by Little, Brown, we asked the person who we, as editors, felt would have a clear understanding of how Dershowitz's mind works--his editor at Little, Brown, Fredrica S. Friedman--to interview him. Their conversation was moderated by Mark Marvel.

FREDRICA S. FRIEDMAN: Alan, I wanted to begin by discussing the way lawyers are seen today in the culture. You remember what Shakespeare said in Henry VI, Part II: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." Many people still believe that lawyers are cynical, greedy, dishonest, and have too much power. Yet the public today is also absolutely in love with lawyers. In America, it's as if they're our newest icon. On television, on movie screens, in best-selling books, the lawyer has become as inescapable a protagonist as the cowboy once was. Why is this?

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: You're absolutely right about the dichotomy. I was just in L.A. over the weekend, and I was having lunch with Bob Shapiro--this was right after he had been on TV for a week straight in the O. J. Simpson [pretrial] hearing. He was like a Hollywood celebrity. Kids, beautiful women, young men, were all coming over to him for his autograph. He had become almost as big as his case and his client. It was obvious that he was a subject of adoration. As he should be, because he is representing a man charged with a capital crime. The American public has a love/hate relationship with lawyers. The problem is, it sometimes loves the wrong lawyers and hates the wrong lawyers. When a lawyer helps bring about the release of somebody who many people may think is guilty, he or she is immediately subject to criticism. Defense lawyers like Bob Shapiro and others ought to be our heroes--the ones who take on the establishment and the ones who do the thankless work of representing people on death row, in mental hospitals, aliens seeking to come into the United States--because these lawyers shake up the system. They are the current-day gladiators, the people about whom Shakespeare wrote, not only negatively in the quotation you gave, but also when he writes about the people who were on the front line, in the days of Macbeth or in the days of Hamlet. Today Shakespeare would be writing about these lawyers. Because when he said, "The play is the thing," today the trial is the "thing." Today the trial is the international drama.

MARK MARVEL: Do you think that part of this lionizing of lawyers has to do with the fact that, as we see more and more high-profile trials on television involving celebrities--or creating celebrities from clients who are unable to speak for themselves--lawyers are being focused on because they are the only ones who are able to speak for them?

AD: Oh, sure. There's no question that Bob Shapiro is seen, in some ways, as the stand-in for O. J. Simpson. O. J. Simpson sat quietly during the [pretrial] hearing. And I have to tell you, in tremendous frustration--because I spoke to O. J. after that hearing, and he wished he could speak. Because he had a great deal to say. But he couldn't speak. That's the reality.

FSF: What do these high-profile cases say about our culture today?

AD: I think what these cases say is that today in America, the most contentious issues--whether they be moral issues, intellectual issues, or whatever--tend to end up in the courtrooms. That's uniquely American in some way. You just don't find that in other countries around the world. If you go to Japan, for example, you will see that trials there play almost no important role in the national psyche, because theirs is a culture, largely, of settling disputes and resolving them. Ours is a culture of contentiousness, in which almost nobody is prepared to lay down his rights and simply submit to authority. And the contentiousness of the trial is an aspect that, I think, reflects both the best and worst of America.