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4.2.12
WC: 191694

In my 40s, I made another career change. I stopped writing law review articles and started to
write books about law for a general audience. My first book, written in my early 40s, was The
Best Defense, which became a national best seller and is still in print. It has been followed by 28
additional books, six of which became best sellers. My books have been translated into a dozen
languages, and well over a million of them have been sold throughout the world. One of them,
Chutzpah, was the number one best seller on The New York Times and other lists. My career as
a popular writer of non-fiction and fiction has been gratifying, especially when readers tell me that
my books have influenced their thinking and their lives. I think of my book writing as part of my
job as a teacher, both to my Harvard law students and to my readers.

In my 40s, I also became a regular presence on national television, explaining the law and
advocating civil liberties positions. I appeared frequently with Ted Koppel, Larry King, Katie
Couric and other widely watched shows. As a result, I became something of a public figure (for
better or worse.) I also met my second wife, Carolyn Cohen, and began to live a more stable and
rewarding home life.

In my 50s, my life changed again. Because of my success as a lawyer, my media visibility and my
books, I began to attract world famous people as clients. The nature of my practice changed
considerably, and although I still took half of my cases without fee, the fees for my paying cases
went up dramatically, and for the first time in my life I was relatively wealthy. My wife and
I—who by this time had a daughter named Ella—bought a beautiful home in Cambridge and a
vacation home on Martha’s Vineyard. We began to collect art and to open our home to students
and charity events. Shortly thereafter, my son Jamin married Barbara and had two children, Lori
and Lyle, making me a relatively young grandfather.

Clients, including several billionaires, were flocking to me and I had my choice of cases. I tried to
strike a balance among the cases I took, but the media focused only on my rich and famous
clients. Suddenly I was a celebrity lawyer. I hated that designation, and it didn’t accurately
reflect my day-to-day work, but it stuck and my obituary will probably use the term, no matter
when it is published.

My next career change took place in my 60s, when I began to devote considerable time and
energy to the defense of Israel against efforts to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish state. As I
entered my seventh decade and looked back on my life’s work, I saw most trends moving in a
positive direction: freedom of expression, though never secure, was expanding; science was
playing more of a role in solving homicides that ever before, though the courts were not keeping
pace with technological developments; racial, gender, religious and even sexual orientation,
equality, though far from complete, was much closer to reality than when I was growing up.
There was, however, one important issue that was moving in the wrong direction: the campaign
to demonize and delegitimize Israel—being conducted by the strangest of bedfellows, the hard
ideological left and the hard Islamic right—was crossing dangerous lines. Israel’s imperfections
(and what nation is anything but imperfect) was becoming the newest excuse for legitimizing the
oldest of bigotries. The line from anti-Zionism to anti-Semitism—a line Martin Luther King
warned about in a speech at Harvard shortly before his death—was being crossed. For the first
time in my adult life, I was seeing an increase in the hatred of Jews.

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