Former Donald Trump lawyer and Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz has proposed a new rule to interrogate lawyers about their political beliefs that critics are calling "McCarthyism revisited."
Dershowitz, a longtime defense attorney who has represented a number of celebrity clients in high-profile cases over the years and was an outspoken defender of former President Donald Trump during his impeachment proceedings, is advocating in the New York Law Journal that legal firms adopt drastic measures to root out supporters of Hamas in their ranks.
In the view of Hofstra University legal ethics professor Ellen Yaroshefsky in a response in the same journal, that would amount to "McCarthyism revisited."
"Alan Dershowitz advocates upending the world of lawyers with the dangerous idea of requiring law firms to have an ethical obligation to inform clients about a lawyer’s political and personal beliefs and get their informed consent for representation," wrote Yaroshefsky.
"Couching this radical idea in the ongoing fraught and emotional Israel/Palestine travesty, he labels all active lawyers in the National Lawyers Guild and Bronx Defenders union as 'Hamas supporters' because of statements issued by those organizations that advocate a cease-fire and support for Palestinian self-determination."
"Lawyers and others who advocate for a cease-fire, who say 'Never Again' and 'Not in Our Name,' and people who advocate for a Palestinian homeland are overwhelmingly not supporters of Hamas’ barbaric actions on Oct. 7," wrote Yaroshefsky.
"Yet Dershowitz thinks it necessary and appropriate for a law firm to have its clients query the lawyer as to whether the lawyer supports the Hamas action as an appropriate military response to Israel’s occupation. Really? Just how would that occur? Imagine a retainer agreement with a 'Hamas informed consent clause.' Or an initial client meeting or beauty contest with a Hamas disclosure."
For that matter, she continued, this could be expanded to all sorts of other political flash points, like support for Ukraine against the Russian invasion, or even beyond wars and geopolitics entirely to domestic policies, like requiring lawyers to disclose their positions on abortion or voting rights.
Despite Dershowitz having been an instructor in legal ethics himself, Yaroshefsky concluded, "no reputable legal ethicist would consider this idea for more than a nanosecond — and then reject it resoundingly."
Furthermore, she said, this idea is so out of line that, "Hopefully, Harvard will query Dershowitz as to the content of his ethics course" and "consider action against [him] for putting students in harm’s way by his online feed requests that people name names and identify faces of students who support Palestinian self-determination and a cease fire."
