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constitutional law weren’t sound enough, and subsequently became one of the most distinguished
law professors at Yale, advised me against going to Harvard: “You won’t fit in there,” he warned
me. When I recounted this story to my Harvard colleague of 50 years, he replied: “Alex was
right. You don’t fit in here.” I never tried to.

In order to obtain tenure, each assistant professor had to publish a “tenure piece.” I wrote an
article on the relationship between law and psychiatry that was critical of the law’s overreliance
on psychiatry in judging whether mentally ill criminals could be held responsible for their crimes,
and whether people thought to be dangerously mentally ill should be preventively detained in
asylums. Because the article insisted that these decisions should be based on legal rather than
medical criteria, and because it was somewhat critical of certain views espoused by my mentor
Judge Bazelon—who was regarded at the epitome of unsoundness by the Harvard Law School
establishment—it was deemed sound and I was voted tenure.

While I was being considered for tenure, I began to get offers from the other elite law
schools—Columbia, Chicago, Stanford, Yale, NYU. I was earning $12,000 a year at Harvard
and would be offered a raise to $14,000 when I received tenure. Stanford offered me $20,000,
which was the highest offer any assistant professor had ever received in the history of law
teaching. It was well above what many full professors at Harvard were then making. I went to
Dean Griswold and told him I couldn’t afford to turn down an additional $6,000 since I had two
kids in private school and no money in the bank. He told me sternly that he could not pay me
more than older professors so he raised everyone’s salary starting with mine to $21,000. I
became the most popular professor among my young colleagues who all benefited from what
became known as “the Dershowitz bump.”

Over my long career at Harvard, I’ve published a great deal. I’ve never counted but one of my
secretaries estimated that she typed a million words a year for me (including legal briefs). This
would amount to 500 books! I love writing. I write every day, on hundreds of subjects, and I
write everything by hand on yellow pads. I venture to guess that I’ve probably published more
words (not necessarily wiser or better, but more) than any professor in the law school’s
history—more than 30 books, hundreds of chapters in other books, dozens of law review articles
and thousands of newspaper and magazine articles.

I’ve probably also taught more different courses than most other professors. These include:

Criminal Law; Constitutional Litigation; Family Law; Psychiatry and the Law; the Prediction and
Prevention of Harmful Conduct; Race and Violence; the Scriptural Sources of Justice; the Law of
Sports; the Legal, Moral and Psychological Implications of Shakespeare’s Tragedies; Ethics and
Tactics in the Trial of Criminal Cases; Human Rights; Terrorism and the Law; Probabilities and
the Law; a Comparative Analysis of Talmud and Common Law; Wikileaks and the First
Amendment; the Arab Israeli Conflict through Literature; Black Power and its Legal Implications;
The Writings of Thomas Jefferson; and Constraining Prosecutorial Misconduct.

In addition to my classes at the law school, I have also taught numerous classes at Harvard
College, including a very large course that I created and taught jointly with Professor Robert
Nozick and Stephen J. Gould, entitled Thinking about Thinking; a seminar with Professor Steven

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