Freedom of speech means freedom for those who you despise, and freedom to express the most despicable views. It also means that the government cannot pick and choose which expressions to authorize and which to prevent.
Alan Dershowitz
Judges are the weakest link in our system of justice, and they are also the most protected.
Hypocrisy is not a way of getting back to the moral high ground. Pretending you're moral, saying you're moral is not the same as acting morally.
It's every lawyer's dream to help shape the law, not just react to it.
It's never acceptable to target civilians. It violates the Geneva Accords, it violates the international law of war and it violates all principles of morality.
Candor and accountability in a democracy is very important. Hypocrisy has no place.
I love discomfort. I mean, my whole life is discomfort. One reason I can never retire is that the idea of just sitting on the beach totally comfortable is not a desideratum in my life. I like ambiguity, I like conflict, I like uncertainly.
Asymmetrical warfare is a euphemism for terrorism, just like collateral damage is a euphemism for killing innocent civilians.
When you discriminate against anyone, you discriminate against everyone. It's a display of terrible intolerance.
All sides in a trial want to hide at least some of the truth.
A criminal trial is never about seeking justice for the victim. If it were, there could be only one verdict: guilty.
I think that lawyers are terrible at admitting that they're wrong. And not just admitting it - also realizing it.
I came from a poor family, so working and going to school at the same time was natural. It taught me multi-tasking, although we didn't call it that back then. I learned I could never be idle, I need to be doing many things at once.
You know, it's ironic to me that Christians want to keep the Ten Commandments in our schools, because Christianity has abrogated four of the Ten Commandments. For example, the Sabbath day according to the Ten Commandments is Saturday, not Sunday. And the reason is because God rested, not because Jesus was resurrected.
In my neighborhood, everyone had an opinion on the local cantor. You didn't go to a synagogue to listen to the rabbi's sermon. You went to listen to the cantor. It was like a concert.
The pervasiveness of guns in our society is destroying America.
Juries are not computers. They are composed of human beings who evaluate evidence differently.
I think most defense attorneys honestly believe the principle that says, 'Better 10 guilty go free than even one possibly innocent person be convicted.'
I don't think the law exists to arrive at the truth. If it did, we wouldn't have exclusionary rules, we wouldn't have presumptions of innocence, we wouldn't have proof beyond reasonable doubt. There's an enormous difference between the role of truth in law and the role of truth in science. In law, truth is one among many goals.
The struggle for morality never stays won. It's always in process.
Every lawsuit results from somebody doing something wrong. If everybody did right, we wouldn't need laws.
I'm a very tough guy, and I fight hard, and I don't give up. And that makes me friends and that makes me enemies, and I know that.
I've had such a satisfying life professionally and personally. I hope my tombstone says, 'Never boring.'
I never do anything for money; I get paid a lot of money as a by-product.
I know Obama, I like Obama, I voted for Obama.
When I decide who to vote for as president, I ask myself who will be best for America and for the world. An important component of my answer involves my assessment of the candidate's willingness and ability to protect Israel's security, since I strongly believe that a strong Israel serves the interests of the United States and of world peace.
I was a Jewish rabbinical student for 12 years, and studied the Bible all the time.
The Internet knows no national borders.
The defendant wants to hide the truth because he's generally guilty. The defense attorney's job is to make sure the jury does not arrive at that truth.
Being offended by freedom of speech should never be regarded as a justification for violence.
There's no evidence that I'm aware of that guns protect liberty.
Well you know, all law is about injustice.
Good character consists of recognizing the selfishness that inheres in each of us and trying to balance it against the altruism to which we should all aspire. It is a difficult balance to strike, but no definition of goodness can be complete without it.
When I was growing up, my mother would always say, 'It will go on your permanent record.' There was no 'permanent record.' If there were a 'permanent record,' I'd never be able to be a lawyer. I was such a bum in elementary school and high school... There is a permanent record today, and it's called the Internet.
The prosecution wants to make sure the process by which the evidence was obtained is not truthfully presented, because, as often as not, that process will raise questions.
The law is agnostic about truth.
Well, many insane people and seriously mentally ill people seem very reasonable.
I was critical of race-based affirmative action early on in my career and I've changed my mind. And I've publicly acknowledged that I was wrong.
You're absolutely right: Bob Grant is a racist, Bob Grant is a bigot, he's a despicable talk show host and I agree with that.
We have to fulfill what the real meaning of the Second Amendment is: reasonable access to guns for self-protection and for hunting. And there's no room in America for these semiautomatic, automatic and other kinds of weapons that are simply designed to cause mass havoc.
I love the Bible.
On television and in the movies, crimes are always solved. Nothing is left uncertain. By the end, the viewer knows whodunit. In real life, on the other hand, many murders remain unsolved, and even some that are 'solved' to the satisfaction of the police and prosecutors lack sufficient evidence to result in a conviction.
We all learn in school that the judicial, legislative and executive branches of government must check and balance each other. But other non state institutions must participate in this important system of checks and balances as well. These checking institutions include the academy, the media, religious institutions and NGOs.
If you're a prosecutor, and you believe the defendant is guilty, you only talk about ultimate truth, but not intermediate truth. If you're the defense attorney, you care deeply about intermediate truth, but you tend to neglect ultimate truth.
The law is agnostic about truth. It's very skeptical of ultimate truth. That's why freedom of speech permits lies to be told.
I think mistakes are the essence of science and law. It's impossible to conceive of either scientific progress or legal progress without understanding the important role of being wrong and of mistakes.
It simply cannot be disputed that for decades the Palestinian leadership was more interested in there not being a Jewish state than in there being a Palestinian state.
I feel like my 50 years at Harvard were an interlude. I'm really a New Yorker.
A visit to Israel is always an experience in cognitive dissonance. The Israel you personally see and hear is so completely different from the Israel you read and hear about in the media.
Real heroes are those who face death for a principle - say, to save the lives of others - without any promise of reward.
