Professor Alan Dershowitz
Comes Home to BC
Harvard Law professor, Constitutional scholar, author, academic superstar and Brooklyn College alumnus (’59) proved “you can go home again” this week when he wowed a standing-room-only audience of students, faculty, staff and alumni in a far-ranging lecture in the Brooklyn College Library’s Woody Tanger Auditorium.
     Dershowitz was clearly in his comfort zone as he warmed up to discussing his book, Finding Jefferson: The First Amendment in the Age of Terrorism.  Following his introduction by President Christoph M. Kimmich, who lauded the Borough Park native for donating his invaluable personal papers to the Brooklyn College Library in August of 2003, the peripatetic professor alternated seamlessly between shtick and impassioned scholarly analysis.
     With a clear relish, Dershowitz, a self-confessed “hondler looking for a bargain” described his discovery and purchase two years ago in New York’s Argosy bookstore of a hand-written letter penned by President Thomas Jefferson on July 3, 1801. It was an acquisition that inspired him to write the first 10,000 words of his then twenty-seventh book that very weekend.

     “The letter was electric,” he said, “in that it deals with issues such as the limits of free speech, censorship, and who should be empowered to, draw the line between dangerous speech and harmful conduct.”
     Dershowitz said that he strongly disagreed with Jefferson’s suggestion that the marketplace of ideas eventually selects and chooses the best ideas, pointing out that because Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany, and the tenets of Nazism triumphed in the marketplace of ideas, didn’t mean that they were sound ideas or a welcome result.
     But he does, he said, agree with Jefferson in that, “though liberty is both dangerous and cacophonous, it is less dangerous to allow provocative speech than to allow censorship.”