Sunday Speaker Series: Alan Dershowitz "The World's Best Known Lawyer"

The Correspondence between President Thomas Jefferson and Senator Elijah Boardman (of New Milford) and its Relevance to Today’s Middle East Debates

The legendary lawyer, professor, and public intellectual Alan Dershowitz will discuss the interrelated themes of two of his (more than 50) books, one with special resonance for New Milford, and the other with special resonance for the ongoing Middle East conflict. 

The 2008 book, Finding Jefferson: A Lost Letter, A Remarkable Discovery, and the First Amendment in an Age of Terrorism, discusses a long-lost letter from Thomas Jefferson to New Milford’s own Elijah Boardman, of a founding New Milford family. Written on July 3, 1801, the letter contains Jefferson’s only published discussion of a key free speech issue that is especially relevant now: when the government may restrict speech for fear that it could lead to terrorism. Alan Dershowitz, who is a passionate collector of historical memorabilia and a passionate Jefferson scholar, acquired the letter from a New York bookstore in 2006, prompting him to write this book. The Jefferson letter has special significance for New Milford not only because its addressee was Elijah Boardman, but also because its subject was a famous sermon that had been delivered in 1800 by the Reverend Stanley Griswold, the pastor of New Milford’s First Congregational Church, and later a U.S. Senator from Ohio. 

The 2024 book, The Ten Big Anti-Israel Lies and How to Refute Them with Truth, carries forward the themes of how best to protect both free speech and safety to today’s fierce debates about the Middle East, presenting Professor Dershowitz’s views about how these debates have gone wrong.  

In the spirit of Jefferson’s disagreements with his New Milford correspondents, Professor Dershowitz welcomes a lively discussion. 

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Alan Dershowitz has been teaching, litigating and writing about law and policy for more than 60 years. He has written 55 books and more than 1000 articles. Many of today’s leaders around the world are among the 10,000 students he has taught. He has represented and advised presidents, prime ministers and business leaders.

Called “The world’s best-known lawyer” and its most prominent defender of civil liberties, he has litigated and won hundreds of cases in multiple countries. He has received numerous honorary degrees, medals and other honors for his work. One such honor was bestowed on him by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel who said: “If there had been a few people like Alan Dershowitz during the 1930s and 1940s, the history of European Jewry might have been different.”

Most of his cases and causes have been pro bono, including his defense of dissidents, such as Anatoly Sharansky, Vaclav Havel, and Julian Assange. Dershowitz graduated first in his class at Yale Law School and was the editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. He taught at Harvard for 50 years, where he offered courses on multiple issues, ranging from criminal, constitutional, family and Jewish laws, as well as psychiatry, neurobiology, mathematics, literature, philosophy and even baseball. His primary academic interest has been on prediction and prevention of harmful conduct – a course he developed and taught during most of his career. Philosophically, he considers himself a libertarian, egalitarian and contrarian.

At age 86, he continues to write and consult, while spending more time with Carolyn, his wife of 39 years, and his three children and two grandchildren.

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President William Jefferson Clinton

“Alan Dershowitz found an important letter from his hero that relates to freedom of speech,

incitement, and terrorism – subjects about which Alan has thought and taught for decades. This

book is a wonderful adventure story that uses Jefferson’s arguments and Dershowitz’s counters

to illuminate issues that were important and difficult when the U.S. was a new nation and that

remain so today. I recommend it to every citizen concerned with preserving our liberties and

combating terrorism.”

David McCullough, historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author

“The 1801 letter of Thomas Jefferson to Elijah Boardman is of tremendous interest and

importance, as is the remarkable story of its discovery by Alan Dershowitz.”

Doris Kearns Goodwin, historian and prize-winning author

“Finding Jefferson is terrific on every level: as a memoir of a passionate collector, it is

delightful; as an account of an important historical discovery, it is riveting; as a defense of free

speech, it is brilliant.”

Ken Burns, director and producer of multiple award-winning films, including Thomas Jefferson

“What a treasure this book is, just like the stuff Dershowitz scours the old archives for. It is

unexpected, revealing and resonant with a central fact of our Republic – we are still stitched

together by words, and their complicated progeny, ideas. From a simple, fortuitous discovery,

Dershowitz has fashioned an elaborate and engaging argument, one we will be thinking about for ages.