“Trials affect American history, and American history affects the trials.”
So says one of America’s best known litigators, famed attorney and law professor Alan Dershowitz.
Over a decades-long legal career Dershowitz has represented clients ranging from Mike Tyson and Leona Helmsley to O.J. Simpson, Donald Trump, and Jeffrey Epstein.
Along the way Dershowitz picked up a unique avocation: reading transcripts. And not just from the cases he was working on.
Dershowitz began reading transcripts of some of America’s most famous – or infamous – trials, from the Salem witch trials and Lizzie Borden to the Scopes monkey trial, and the Rosenbergs.
In 2004 Dershowitz wrote a book about many of those trials, based on nuggets of previously-overlooked material he found deep in those transcripts. He called his book America on Trial, and that spring he and I talked about it when he went on a book tour.
So here now, from 2004, Alan Dershowitz.
Alan Dershowitz is 86. He lives in New York and Florida.
