Sievers' Scholarly Matters Blog: Harvard Law Professor Cleans House

Harvard Law Professor Cleans House

In the New York Times of 6/22/05 it is reported that famous, and sometimes infamous, Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz is in the process of leaving his archives to Brooklyn College, rather than Harvard University, his long-time employer. Even more remarkable than that is the fact that he is giving it all away rather tham cashing in big time, for big bucks, to the highest bidder, which is the norm these days for writers of importance and those who are associated with sensation and celebrity. Names such as Norman Mailer, Woodstein (Bob Woodward/Carl Bernstein), and many others have sold their papers to the archives who offer seven figure sums, amounts that would make an NBA player proud. Very often the buyer is UT Austin, which many years ago set a course to, in great part, buy their way to being a world class research center.

Professor Dershowitz certainly has the goods. Box upon box of papers, law briefs, televised interviews on "Geraldo" no less, pertaining to a number of sensational celebrity trials, as well as important documents on such mattters as civil rights which created what has become in somes cases the bedrock of American legal history. The celebrity linked materials, dealing with his work on the O.J. Simpson defense, Mike Tyson's legal entanglements, and Mike Milken's guilty verdict -- one of the first prominent business tycoons to be splashily cuffed and marched off to "prison lite." Of course the most interesting boxes of all magic marked "Von Bulow" relate to his victorious defence of Claus von Bulow accused of murdering his heiress wife Sunny. Professor Dershowitz wrote a popular book about his unlikely defense of a man generally regarded as a monster, "Reversal of Fortune" which was later made into an academy award winning film starring Jeremy Irons and Glen Close. The film depicts Dershowitz himself, played by Ron Silver, and his team of young eager legal scholars and their building of the defense which led to an acquittal. All of this is the stuff of continuing interest to scholars and the public. Unfortunately lawyer/client privelege means a long wait to access a lot of this.

Professor Dershowitz is taking the proletarian approach via donation rather than sale, to his alma mater Brooklyn College. According to the Times, he regarded his most important document in his life to be his acceptance letter to Brooklyn College. This was because it was an environment that nurtured and encouraged his iconclastic bent. Brooklyn College also gave him a scholarship which made possible a college education. In his donating he takes the further proletarian approach of making numerous trips himself from Cambridge to Brooklyn with a U-Haul aor similar filled to the rim with boxes of "stuff."

Ten dollar an hour student processors and busily inventorying the lot in the Dershowitz Processing Room, and the archivist Professor Cucchiara, who was instrumental in obtaining the gift, is organizing an exhibit of the Brooklyn College Archives in general, which will include one Dershowitz document, this being a hate letter excoriating him in unpleasant language.

This Dershowitz business got me to thinking that another viewing of the film Reversal of Fortune was in order, if nothing more than to hear wonderful Jeremy Irons playing the creepy quasi-aristocrat Claus von Bulow utter his famous line, in response to Alan Dershowitz, his lawyer. Alan Dershowitz: "You are a very strange man." Claus von Bulow: "You have no idea." .