Alan Dershowitz Quotes

It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights ... at the school house door.

Shake any institution of higher learning, and a dozen boycotters will fall out of it.

I believe America went wrong in terms of respecting the First Amendment, the state of free speech on American college campuses and on the media and in academia.

I fear that the impact of university censorship and university denial of due process will be to mis-educate a generation of students away from core values of civil liberties and constitutional safeguards. Students who have been led to believe by university administrators and faculty that censorship and denial of due process are acceptable norms will be more susceptible to accepting those norms in their post-university lives. That would be a tragedy for America.

Even though some in our government may claim that civil liberties must be compromised in order to protect the public, we must be wary of what we are giving up in the name of fighting terrorism.

As long as algebra is taught in school, there will be prayer in school.

Civil libertarians have raised concerns that some of the Patriot Act's provisions infringe on Constitutional rights. Those concerns are not supported by the facts.

People have rights and government must be kept from trampling on them.

It is ingrained into our national life that the rule of law makes us free.

The University is not engaged in making ideas safe for students. It is engaged in making students safe for ideas. Thus it permits the freest expression of views before students, trusting to their good sense in passing judgment on these views. Only in this way can it best serve American democracy.

No student who shall be expelled from a university by a decision of the university senate which was ratified or prompted by the agent of the government, or who shall have left the institution in order to escape expulsion, shall be received in any other university... .

It is not only under Nazi rule that police excesses are inimical to freedom. It is easy to make light of insistence on scrupulous regard for the safeguards of civil liberties when invoked on behalf of the unworthy. It is too easy. History bears testimony that by such disregard are the rights of liberty extinguished, heedlessly at first, then stealthily, and brazenly in the end.

If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers.

By giving in to protesters, colleges are denying the majority of students their right to hear controversial opinions and drawing their own conclusions about those opinions.

I have been personally victimized by organized disruption of a public lecture on a university campus - at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Michigan State University, and Rhode Island's Providence College, to name only a few.

Due process gives teachers the latitude to use their professional judgment in their classrooms, to advocate for their students, and to not fear retribution for speaking the truth or teaching controversial subjects like evolution. As political winds shift in school districts, due process also wards off patronage or nepotism.

The list of gifted teachers and librarians who find their jobs in jeopardy for defending their students' right to read, to imagine, to question, grows every year.

I'm a believer in the Constitution and in the First Amendment. Not just for raising money but also for freedom of speech.

Universities are not places where police can come and arrest people. Let the children have a discourse as they want to. They will learn as they move on in life. But to target individuals and institutions is dangerous.

It is not always easy to balance freedom of expression with the needs of the justice system.

I don't know everybody's view on due process, but I do have an opinion on what the Constitution says, what the Pledge of Allegiance implies, what sixth- and seventh-graders are taught in civics classes, and I think it is that you're going to have the opportunity to be heard.

I think students ought to have the right to protest, but not to the point of anarchy.

It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.

Students throughout the totalitarian world risk life and limb for freedom of expression, many American college students are demanding that big brother restrict their freedom of speech on campus. This demand for enhanced censorship is not emanating only from the usual corner - the know-nothing fundamentalist right - it is coming from the radical, and increasingly not-so-radical left as well.

I was invited to give the Freshmen Convocation at Florida Gulf Coast University on October 24, 2004. My book The Open Space of Democracy had been selected as one of the "common readers" for the university's 1,050 entering freshmen. On October 6, William Merwin, the president of Florida Gulf Coast, made the decision to "postpone" the convocation. He cited negative statements I had made in print about President Bush. If our colleges and universities are no longer the champions and protectors of free speech, then no voice in this country is safe.