Esteemed Harvard Law Professor, Alan Dershowitz, to Retire

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One of Harvard Law School’s most esteemed faculty members, Alan M. Dershowitz, will be stepping down from his post at the end of this week, according to a story from The Boston Globe.

Dershowitz was 25 when he was hired as a member of the faculty at Harvard Law and in 1967 he became the youngest full-time professor in the history of Harvard Law School.

  

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“Yeah, I’m really retiring,” Dershowitz said during an interview with The Boston Globe. “My retirement consists of reducing my schedule down to only about 10 things at any given time.”

Dershowitz will handle at least three cases, write books, and take strolls on the boardwalk close to his house in Florida during his retirement. He noted that he will break from teaching for at least a year, but will probably come back to Harvard to teach once again.

“The word retiring has many meanings, and Alan Dershowitz is not a retiring person,” Harvard Law Dean Martha Minow said. “We expect and hope he will continue to be involved here.”

Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at the school and he made a name for himself in the constitutional and criminal law niches. He has appeared on TV, written dozens of books, and worked as criminal defense attorney on prominent trials.

During his tenure at Harvard Law, Dershowitz said that he taught 10,000 students over 100 semesters and was never tardy to any of his classes. He did say that he missed a single class because of a delayed train from New York.

“I remember vividly my first class. It’s all gone by in a wink,” he said. “If there’s one bit of advice I can give to my students, it’s to live life to the fullest because it goes by so quickly.”

An attorney in Boston, Martin G. Weinberg, was one of Dershowitz’s students. The two then worked together as co-counsel on quite a few prominent cases. One of those cases was the Chicago Eight, then known as the Chicago Seven, back in 1968. They worked as defense lawyers for the group who planned riots during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

“For 50 years, he’s consistently defended the rights of the least popular citizens of the United States of America,” Weinberg said in an interview with The Boston Globe. “Few people can be counted on to take the right side of something so consistently and no matter how unpopular it is. He’s the most courageous advocate I know, to both clients and causes.”