Alan Dershowitz
speaker
787 appearances
8 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 16 Aug
Alan Dershowitz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.
Appearances
We should not be having warfare on either side. But it's understandable when the left uses lawfare, going after Donald Trump in the New York case. was the worst criminal case I've seen in 60 years of being involved in defending criminals. I've never seen a case as bad as the New York case.
So lawfare started, started with the Democrats, and now we're seeing tit-for-tat reprisals by the Republicans. Both are wrong.
Well, let's just go back to Governor Wallace, who made the same kinds of statements back in 1954, 1955 and 1966. He said, we have laws in the state of Mississippi, the state of Alabama that prohibit black students from going to school with white students. And we're going to enforce our laws. And the federal government said no. No, no, no.
We have a constitutional, and in this case, Article 9, Article, you know, all these various titles coming in that are federal law. And under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, the civil rights laws, federal civil rights laws, trump state laws. And so there is a legal basis for enforcing federal law over the states. And as I say, it goes back to the 50s when the shoe was on the other foot.
Again, if the state of California, they would never do it. But if the state were to say, we're not going to permit black athletes from participating in basketball because they're too good and they, you know, or dominate the sport, we would never tolerate that for one second. We would never tolerate. We need more diversity in the NBA. No, that's meritocracy.
I think ultimately the Supreme Court is going to have to uphold the withholding of federal funds from states and other institutions that violate federal law. It has nothing to do with the particular case. It has to do with the dominance of the supremacy clause. Without the supremacy clause, you couldn't have the United States of America. There would be the Confederate States.
... reign supreme. Otherwise, we're back to the Articles of Confederacy. And that didn't work. And so some of us may not like the way it's being used. And in my family, too, we fight like children about transgender athletes. There are many points of view on that. And it seems to me that President Trump ran on that theory. And the majority of Americans support it. And the law seems to support it.
So whatever you think of the policies, I think we're going to see ultimately the Supreme Court upholding most of these Trump initiatives, but demanding that they be done with due process, that they not have shortcuts around the constitutional requirements of due process of law.
He can't stop it, but he can punish it. And that's what he's threatening to do. I suspect that we're going to see, because of the politics of California, they're going to go through with it. That gives the governor of California and others a domestic political victory. And then we'll see Trump impose some punishment that gives him a national victory. And we're going to see that.
And I think there's going to be a conflict throughout the country between various titles of the Civil Rights Act and what people think is the right thing. I helped to draft the title of the Civil Rights Act that applied anti-discrimination provisions on college campuses to Jews. And that was unpopular with some people. But it's now the law. You're incredible.
Yeah, very much so.
Yeah, yeah. I was at the White House when it was announced, et cetera. So I've been involved in a lot of these things right from the beginning. But I am a meritocratic egalitarian. I care deeply about that. I am a constitutional libertarian. I am a constructive contrarian. Those are my three philosophical bases. I haven't changed one bit in the 70 years since I entered college.
But the world around me has changed dramatically. And it's interesting, you know, my book, The Preventive State, I started writing this 60 years ago. I wrote my first article on prevention in the 1960s. And now all of these things are coming out. The COVID vaccines, the attempts to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.
All of these are preventive measures that we now have to create a jurisprudence around because we live in such a cataclysmic world. There are so many dangers that we face every single day, and we can prevent them because we've developed AI methods of predicting and preventing. But we can't do it without diminishing freedom a little bit.
And it was Benjamin Franklin who said, those who would deny basic freedoms in order to achieve a little bit of security deserve neither. But In my book, The Preventive State, I try to argue that we can sometimes diminish a little bit of inessential freedoms in order to get a great deal of prevention.
If we could have prevented 9-11, if Israel could have prevented October 7th by falsely arresting a half a dozen people, that would be a tradeoff that would be worth it. And we have to figure out how to prevent these cataclysmic, situations from occurring.
And we're seeing the hard left and the radicals and the terrorists and the people who call for global intifada trying to introduce massive, massive violence into our society. And we have to figure out ways of preventing it legally, lawfully.
Well, I feel terrible for her, for her family. This is not the way anything like this should have ended. She did falsely accuse me. She admitted she may have misidentified me for somebody else. I was hoping to get on with my life and let her get on with her life. By the way, we still haven't seen all the Epstein files. I want every single file out. I want every video out.
I want everything that is. Well, because there are still people in there. I know a couple of people who are named. And I think there are people who don't want their names to come out. I want everything to come out because they would prove I never met the woman, never heard of her, never had any proper contact with anybody. Since I met Jeffrey Epstein. And so I want everything to come out.
And I don't know why they aren't bringing it all. Everything, every piece of paper, some of them being being withheld by judges. And by the way, some of them would show that some of the accusations are false, that they would be negative toward the accusers. Some would be negative toward the accused.
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