Tickets for the first Distinguished Leadership Lecture of the 2018-19 academic year, postponed from September due to Hurricane Florence, have been distributed. The lecture will be streamed to Yeager Recital Hall on Elon University's main campus for those unable to attend in Greensboro.
Alan Dershowitz, an influential Harvard Law School professor emeritus and one of the most visible legal commentators in American media, will deliver remarks as the first guest of the law school’s 2018-19 Distinguished Leadership Lecture Series presented by The Joseph M. Bryan Foundation.
Wednesday, November 14, 2018
6:30 p.m.
Elon Law Library (201 N. Greene Street in Greensboro)
NOTE: Tickets distributed in September will be honored at the program. For students and faculty unable to visit Greensboro, the lecture will be streamed on main campus in Yeager Recital Hall in the Center for the Arts.
Professor Emeritus Alan M. Dershowitz is a Brooklyn native who has been called “the nation’s most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer,” one of its “most distinguished defenders of individual rights,” “the best-known criminal lawyer in the world” and “the top lawyer of last resort.”
The Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law Emeritus at Harvard Law School has argued hundreds of appeals in courts throughout the nation throughout his career and he continues to consult actively on both transnational and domestic criminal and civil liberty cases, devoting half of his practice to pro bono cases and causes.
He has recently been a prominent critic of the ongoing special counsel investigation of the Trump Administration and instead believes the best way to investigate Russian interference in American elections would be a nonpartisan investigative commission similar to one established after the September 11 terror attacks.
Dershowitz has published more than 1,000 articles in magazines, newspapers, journals and blogs. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Huffington Post, Gatestone, Newsmax, Jerusalem Post, Ha’aretz, and Algemeiner.
Dershowitz is the author of 35 fiction and nonfiction works with a worldwide audience, including the New York Times #1 bestseller “Chutzpah” and several other national bestsellers. His most recent books are “Trumped Up: How Criminalization of Political Differences Endangers Democracy” published in 2017, and “The Case Against BDS: Why Singling Out Israel for Boycott Is Anti-Semitic and Anti-Peace”, published in 2018.
Dershowitz likewise has been named America’s most “public Jewish Defender” and “the Jewish state’s lead attorney in the court of public opinion.” The Yale Law School graduate joined the Harvard Law School faculty at age 25 – the youngest in the school’s history – and assumed emeritus status after 50 years of teaching more than 10,000 students.
He has received numerous honorary doctoral degrees and academic awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on human rights, a fellowship at The Center for the Advanced Study of Behavioral Sciences and several Dean’s Awards for his books.
In 1983, the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith presented him with the William O. Douglas First Amendment Award for his “compassionate eloquent leadership and persistent advocacy in the struggle for civil and human rights.”