Wendy McElroy has an interesting post on the History News Network blog about famed civil libertarian attorney Alan Dershowitz and his attempt to prevent the publication of a book that is critical of him. The book, written by Norman Finkelstein, accuses Dershowitz, among other things, of plagiarism in lifting quotes second hand from other scholars, complete with mistakes made in the original. According to McElroy, Dershowitz even went so far as to send a letter to the governor of California asking him to intervene and prevent the University of California Press from publishing the book, in addition to having his attorneys send threatening letters to virtually everyone involved in the book. The whole thing strikes me as absurd. As a civil libertarian, Dershowitz has always reminded us, and rightfully so, that the proper response to speech one does not like is to use our own speech to counter it and show the flaws in it; apparently, that doesn't apply when he himself is criticized.
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That's most unfortunate. Hypocrisy will cause similar damage to his reputation as would that which might occur if the allegations are indeed true. Considering his background, I'm inclined to suspect that they are.
I have not paid that close attention to Dershowitz, but I have not seen anything that would lead me to conclude that he is much of a civil libertarian.
It is this type of hypocrisy that will do more damage to his reputation than any criticism. He will fade away into the sunset after this.
Personally, I started to lose faith in Alan Dershowitz when he came out in favor of torture. This only makes things worse - though I'm going to keep an eye out to see if it's actually true.
Dershowitz had a pretty convincing defense of himself in the LA Times.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-le-dershowitz14.2jul14,1,6837931.story