Gavel © Ruslan Grumble

According to his new memoir, Taking the Stand, famed defense attorney Alan Dershowitz has two personas: “the Dersh character” and “the real Alan.” But reading his book, you will wonder if he isn’t in fact eight people rolled into one. Now in his seventh decade, the lawyer has an apparent inexhaustible supply of energy, and glancing relationship with a full night’s sleep.

In addition to defending high profile clients such as Mike Tyson, OJ Simpson, Bill Clinton, and Julian Assange, he also writes memoirs and fiction, teaches at Harvard, lectures and debates on a variety of topics, and travels around the world as an advocate of Israel. To many, though, he will always be best known for Ron Silver’s portrayal of him as the pugnacious, fiery-tempered lawyer for creepy accused wife-murderer Claus von Bulow in the movie "Reversal of Fortune." In this latest book, Dershowitz tries to parse the difference between his public and private selves, blending anecdotes about his celebrity clients with a long backward glance at his formative experiences as a Jew, a lawyer, and a man.

Biographile: You have already written several memoirs – in The Boston Globe, a reviewer wonders if you’re trying to break Willie Mays’ record of three autobiographies. Why write another memoir?

Alan Dershowitz: My previous books dealt with narrow aspects of my career. This one starts with the day I was born and ends with the day after my obituary appears. It covers a panoramic view of the last half century of law as seen through the eyes of a lawyer who helped shape the legal landscape. It relates my life experiences as a person to my cases and causes as a lawyer.

BIOG: You open the book with personal reminiscences about your childhood. Do you find it more difficult to write about your personal life or your professional life?

AD: Writing about my personal life presents different challenges than writing about my professional life. Writing about my personal life requires introspection and self-criticism, whereas writing about my professional life requires a more objective view.

BIOG: You end the book with a ‘posthumous’ letter to the editor, complaining about your obituary, which you assume will unfairly emphasize your high profile cases and defense of Israel, while neglecting your pro-bono cases and principled philosophy. Do you believe this book will, in fact, set the record straight about your life and career, or are you resigned to being misunderstood?

AD: I’m hoping the book will set the record straight particularly with regard to my defense of Israel. It reflects very poorly on my critics that they see my defense of Israel as inconsistent with my lifetime commitment to liberal and civil liberties causes. I am a liberal defender of Israel and a critic of some of its illiberal policies. Any intelligent and fair person can see this and those who don’t are either fools or knaves—or both.

BIOG: You write that this book will “place my entire professional life into the broader context of how the law has changed over the last half century.” How have these legal changes affected your personal understanding of guilt and innocence?

AD: There are two kinds of cases involving guilt or innocence. Those that are black and white with no shades of gray: the defendant either committed the murder or he didn’t, and if he did there are no mitigating circumstances. These cases have to be solved by science and I have pioneered the effort to introduce science into the courtroom. The other category involves cases that are matters of degree: the defendant did it but what he did may not have been criminal, or if criminal, might be mitigated by circumstances. In both categories, it is still better for 10 guilty to go free than for 1 innocent to be wrongly convicted.

BIOG: If you could be remembered for just one case, which case would it be, and why?

AD: The one case I would like to be remembered for is my defense of Anatoly Sharansky and other Soviet dissidents. There but for the grace of God go I. I could easily have been the dissident and Sharansky the lawyer.

BIOG: What other legal memoirs do you admire?

AD: The legal memoirs that influenced my life were written by Clarence Darrow and Edward Bennett Williams. In the interest of placing honesty over false modesty, Taking the Stand is a more thorough, more interesting and more educational memoir.

BIOG: You obviously lead a very busy life. When do you find the time to write? Why is this type of writing important to you?

AD: I write every day. I can’t imagine not writing. I’m already working on my next book. Writing for me is a way to expand my teaching beyond the classroom to a larger audience. I write the way I teach, Socraticly, provocatively and educationally.