Is it possible that Alan Dershowitz is busier now that he’s retired?
Never one to rest on his considerable laurels, the famed defense attorney and former Harvard Law professor has not one but two books coming out, one of them dealing with the various legal issues engulfing the Trump administration.
“I finished it two days ago,” Dershowitz told us Thursday, reached at his place on Martha’s Vineyard. “It’s 150 pages long. I work fast.”
Dershowitz said the book, due out in August, might be called “Trumped Justice” or “Trumping Justice” or “The Trump Effect.” But its subtitle is definitely “How the Criminalization of Political Differences Endangers Democracy.”
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Dersh, in case you’ve missed his many TV appearances of late, does not think the president has obstructed justice, and he’s worried that claims to the contrary are politically motivated and not based in law.
“The first recourse of political zealots is to find a crime,” he said. “I make a very sharp distinction between sin and crime, between what’s wrong and what’s criminal.”
Dershowitz concedes that this distinction is wildly unpopular among his many left-leaning friends on the Vineyard, some of whom like to harangue him on the porch of the Chilmark General Store after one or another of his appearances, seemingly in defense of the president, on CNN or Fox News.
“I’m welcomed on the porch with open arms,” Dershowitz says. “But then they say, ‘Why aren’t you trying to get Trump removed from office? Why are you making this a problem for us?’”
In case you’re wondering, his other soon-to-be-published book is “The Case Against BDS,” a collection of Dershowitz’s past writings against boycott, divestment, and sanctions of Israel.