Alan Dershowitz: On His Magnum Opus, The Preventive State

Alan Dershowitz, the famous Harvard Law School professor who just turned eighty-seven, published what he considers his magnum opus earlier this year. His fifty-seventh book, The Preventive State, explores questions he has been grappling with since his twenties. Primarily, Professor Dershowitz seeks to provide a framework societies can use to assess how to reduce harm while also balancing the ensuing risks to liberty. He suggests that there is always a trade-off between liberty and security; however, thus far, legal scholars have paid far too little attention to questions in this vein. Peppered throughout the book are also interesting insights—for example, that tough cases make bad precedent—as well as that many popular understandings of the law ought to be reconsidered upon closer examination such as the famous thought experiment about "yelling fire in a crowded movie theater" (from the 1919 Supreme Court case Schenck v. United States).

In this interview with Merion West editor-in-chief Erich J. Prince, Professor Dershowitz observes that this book, despite being likely his most important, has received comparatively little media attention, something he attributes to the fact that he was previously part of President Donald Trump's legal defense team.