Alan Dershowitz Quotes

Being a lawyer, it's like holding a key card to a parallel dimension of rule sets in the world, and it's lovely to make sure that key continues to work and to continue to brush up on the law every so often.

I have an affinity for the law. I like looking at the small type on contracts, and if I could have afforded law school, I probably would have gone.

What I really like about law is that it's not an endless discourse like history or philosophy. In law, there comes a point where problems have to be solved, and cases decided.

I like practicing law.

The American preoccupation with the law, which is certainly not past, was at its zenith in 1995. The 1980s, the late 1980s, had sort of begun to percolate up to public consciousness this enormous interest in the law.

My job is to interpret the law based on how the legislature and the court has done it and then, of course, to use our system of justice to develop some new legal tools and new concepts.

The president appoints the judges. Your lives and your children's lives can change by all of these appellate court judges who will be appointed who will reinterpret laws, and things can change.

Law is not a science, but is essentially empirical.

The study of law is, after all, largely the study of history.

Every lawyer of experience comes to know (more or less unconsciously) that in the great majority of cases, the precedents are none too good as bases of prediction. Somehow or other, there are plenty of precedents to go around.

I do hope that some of my dissents will one day be the law.

Judges should interpret the law, not make it.

My dream job would be a lawyer. I can talk my way out of anything, and I love cross-examining people. I think I'd be a really good lawyer.

All of the legal defense funds out there, they're looking for people out there with court of appeals experience, because court of appeals is where policy is made. And I know, I know this is on tape and I should never say that because we don't make law, I know. I know.

I was a lawyer for 12 years in New York and Sweden.

I've been told by the prosecutors and by my own attorneys I should go to law school. I guess I have a knack for it.

Law builds upon and, I should like to claim, is one of the liberal arts. It uses words of persuasion and changing definitions for practical ends.

The power of the lawyer is in the uncertainty of the law.

It doesn't make sense for me to be a lawyer in a place where there is no law.

Our lady the Common Law is a very wise old lady though she still has something to learn in telling what she knows.

Yes, I was going to law school and it was closed in '69.

Harvard Law provided an opportunity to learn from a faculty that had shaped the laws of our country and helped to change the world around us. It also offered an opportunity to study with the brightest students and to test myself against the best.

The U.S. is blessed with tremendously creative and imaginative law students at places like Chicago, Harvard, Columbia and Yale.

I decided I wanted to be a lawyer when I was 11 years of age.

Law is a formless mass of isolated decisions.