Alan Dershowitz and Steven Donziger have spent their legal careers standing up for the unfairly targeted. Both have seen the government and private industries manipulate the legal system as a way to punish their adversaries. Donziger himself was disbarred and incarcerated after his international legal victories over Chevron, and his conviction has drawn calls for a pardon from leaders across the political spectrum. Two grizzled courtroom veterans relive their toughest fights, both in triumph and defeat, while conveying just how easy it can be to find the target landing on your own back.
Alan Dershowitz has been teaching, writing and litigating 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 the10,000 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.
Steven Donziger is a lawyer and environmental activist who has been the target of an oil company revenge campaign for over 30 years. In 2013, Steven helped Amazon communities in Ecuador win the largest environmental judgment in history when a court ordered Chevron to pay $9.5 billion ($12 billion today) to restore ancestral lands despoiled by the dumping of billions of gallons of cancer-causing oil waste. In retaliation, Chevron used its political and financial capital to countersue Steven for contempt of court, strip him of his law license, and detain him at home and prison for close to three years. While Steven continues the battle against Chevron, he also advocates for other victims of corporate malfeasance and offers legal interpretations of human rights issues.