May 19, 2025 • 36 mins
In this episode, Alan Dershowitz discusses his new book, 'The Preventative State,' which explores the balance between preventing serious harms and preserving essential liberties. He emphasizes the importance of prevention in various contexts, including government actions, climate change, and immigration. The conversation delves into the complexities of political decision-making, the role of culture in diplomacy, and the impact of leadership on policy. The Tudor Dixon Podcast is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network. For more visit TudorDixonPodcast.com
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the Tutor Dixon Podcast. We have the great
Alan Dershowitz with us today. He has a new book
coming out called The Preventative State, The Challenge of Preventing
serious harms while preserving essential liberties.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
There it is, you see it, and I think it's
a very.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Good book to be talking about right now, Alan, because
of everything that's going.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
On in the world.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
Yeah, everything is about prevention. Deportation is about preventing violence.
Bombing Iran or making a deal with Iran is about
preventing them from getting nuclear weapons. Israel's actions and Goza,
controversial as they are, are intended to prevent the repetition
of October seventh. And in my book To Prevent a State,
(00:41):
I go through every conceivable active prevention, ranging from medical
intervention to climate intervention. I put them all together and
I create a conceptual framework for analyzing this major shift
that's going on in our society. Larry Summers, president of Harvard,
put it very well. He says, no one but Alan
(01:03):
Dershowitz would seek to bring common motive thought to issues
as the versus bail, climate change, and terrorism. And that's
what I try to do. Because I've noted a major change.
You know, we used to wait until horms occurred and
then we would go and punish them. Today the harms
are so serious nuclear, environmental, medical, that we move much earlier,
(01:24):
and we endanger civil liberties when we do that, we
also protect people. And the goal of my book is
to create a balance which allows the government to act
preventively but without denying essential civil liberties.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Now it's interesting, I mean I found it fascinating because
as I'm reading through it as somebody who's run for office,
that's really the thought process you go through with everything
that you everything in your platform, and what you're considering.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Okay, if we remove.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Taxes here, what is the ultimate effect of that? If
you prevent if you try to prevent school shootings, what
are you taking away?
Speaker 2 (02:01):
And you have a lot of that.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
One is one that's obviously very sensitive to me because
I have kids in school, Because I have parents who say,
I don't want to have my kids checked when they walked,
when they walk in the door, But then, well, don't
you want your kids to be safe?
Speaker 2 (02:15):
So you have to balance all that.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
Oh, I have a whole chapter in the book on
red flag laws. On these are rules that are designed
to prevent guns from falling into the hands of young
people who can use them in school shooting. So I
deal with that, and the red flag laws have prevented
some shootings, but they've also disarmed people who probably have
(02:38):
a right under the Second Amendment to bear arms. So
you know, there's no free lunch, and every time you
improve our safety, you risk the possibility of diminishing our liberty.
Benjamin Franklin put that very well two hundred years ago
when he said that giving up a little bit of
(02:59):
liberty for safety is a problem that we have to
deal with. In my view, if you give up just
a little bit and you get a lot in return,
that's a good trade off. But if you give up
a lot and you get very little in return, that's
not a good trade off. And so what I try
to do in this book for laymen, obviously for average readers,
(03:22):
is to suggest an approach of jurisprudence. For example, we
all know that when somebody is charged with murder, we say,
better ten guilty go free than one innocent be wrong.
You can find the ten to one ratio, which actually
comes from the Bible. But when it comes to preventing harms.
How many nine to elevens are we prepared to prevent
in exchange for how much intrusion into the rights of people?
(03:47):
That's the tradeoff. We haven't figured out a way of
analyzing that yet, and that's what I try to do
in the preventive State. And you know it's available now.
You can get it on Amazon. So I hope people
will read it and and get in touch with me
and give me input because this is a work in progress.
This is the first book on the jurisprudence of prevention,
and I hope it won't be the last book. I
(04:08):
hope it will start others asking questions about this, including
elected officials.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
I think that is that's the most valuable part about it,
is you start to think more deeply about it.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
And I think oftentimes when.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
We do make new laws, I always say it's the
unintended consequences of the laws that people years later say, oh,
how did this happen?
Speaker 2 (04:31):
And now we can't do this and we can't do that.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
But I look back at the Founding Fathers and you
talk about that quote, and I think, you know, they
were much closer to oppression than we were. I mean,
they had lived it, so they understood it from a
different point of view. And I think oftentimes, especially the
youngest generation that's coming up in Congress today, you know,
the people in their twenties and their thirties, I think
(04:56):
they're quick to say, we want to protect everybody, and
so they don't always think about those unintended consequences.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
This book is I mean.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
Honestly, this is what makes you go there is so
much more to contemplate when you are making the decision
to do something as radical as create a new law.
And I know people say, oh, we're making new laws
every day, but you should think of it as radical
because you're changing the law. You should make sure that
you know everything about you've thought it through every possible way.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
But I don't know if we're doing that. And this
made me think that.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
Too many of us believe in that T shirt that
says just do it. I want to have it says
think about it first and then do it. Take, for example,
the obvious problem of what do you do with somebody
who's arrested for a crime but it's presumed innocent. Do
you keep him in jail pending trial or not? And
if you do keep him in jail. We'll never know
whether he would have committed a crime. But if you
(05:55):
let him out and he commits a crime, that's very visible,
and the judge says, oh my god, look what I've done.
And so the inclination is to lock them up when
in doubt, throw away the key. And I do an
analysis that shows that a lot of people have spent
a lot of years in prison for things they never
would have done and never did do. And so we
(06:15):
have to focus both on the innocent and the guilty,
on prevention, but also on not denying people basic liberties
or we won't live through the COVID. And there were
mandatory injections and some people got sick as the result
of it. And I quote a letter from George Washington
to his troops. I actually own the letter, written in
(06:38):
the hand of Alexander Hamilton. It's on my wall, urging
all American troops during the Revolutionary War to be inoculated
against smallpox. Washington says, we won't lose this war to
the British, but we might lose it to smallpox if
every soldier doesn't get inoculated. And of course, back in
the day an oculation was not as safe as it
(06:58):
is today, and so for everything, we have to strike
a balance. For climate control, we lose jobs when we
get too green, but we lose climates when we don't
get green enough. So how do you make those very
difficult course benefit analyses? And what I do is provide
a framework for doing that based on my sixty years
(07:19):
of teaching. This is my magnum opus. You know, I'm
now eighty six years old and I've written fifty seven books,
but this is the most important one I wrote. It's
something I've been working on for sixty years. I started
teaching in the area of prevention when I got to
Harvard nineteen sixty four, and I probably taught thirty courses
(07:39):
on prevention over the years and probably gave one hundred lectures.
And so it's all summarized in this book, The Preventive State.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
I mean, it really should be required reading for anyone
who is considering running for office or anybody who's in
office right now. You brought up climate change and the
discussions around that. What we've done in Michigan, we've seen
that in a more aggressive manner because the governor has
come out and said she wants to be fully renewable
(08:08):
energy by twenty thirty five. That alone has really damaged
the ability for the state of Michigan to get new
businesses because there's that feeling of I don't know if
I will have energy, I don't know if I can
manufacture with this type of limitation. How do you talk
to because I think politics comes into this too. I
(08:29):
don't think that decision was based solely on this is
what's best for the environment. But also there's a lot
of pressures from the political outside to come in and
say you have to do this or we won't support you.
So how do you balance the politics of it with
the decision making.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
Oh, you're absolutely right, there are pressures on both sides.
If you don't do enough for the environment, we're gonna
have problems twenty years from now. But if you do
too much, we're gonna lose jobs now. And in the book,
I talk about the difference between acts that have an
packed immediately and acts that have an impact twenty years
from now. Politicians obviously care more about tomorrow in the
(09:06):
day after tomorrow than they care about months or years
from now, And the basic question is who decides. And
of course, in a democracy that people decide, and it's
always going to be a tradeoff. There are those who say,
and they may be right, that if you go green,
you can create new jobs. We'll prove it to us,
show us. But generally that isn't the case. Generally they
(09:28):
have to be trade offs, and generally you have to
give up something to get something. And that's what I
propose in the book, and I propose mechanisms for making
those decisions and how they get made. Should it be
the courts, should it be the legislature, Should it be
the governor, the executive, the president. These are all things
that are being debated now. For example, in the context
of deportation, we know that there are too many criminal
(09:52):
aliens in the United States who are endangering our people.
We see it every day, and they're very visible. When
an alien, an illegal alien, commits a rape, for a
murderers the front page in the story. And yet there
are many who don't, who live good lives. And so
what we have to do is create more visibility on
both sides and let America make the decision. We are
(10:15):
a nation of immigrants, but we are a nation of
legal immigrants, and so we have to pose the question
in the context of deportation and President Trump's about to
mega decision today or tomorrow. Should he bomb Iran's nuclear facilities?
That would be completely preventive. It's called the Beagan doctrine
because monk and began when he was the Prime Minister
(10:36):
of Israel decided to bomb Iraq's nuclear reactor, which saved many,
many American lives. Because when America went into Iran. Can
you imagine what would have happened if one hundred thousand
American troops were greeted by nuclear weapons from Iran? But
Israel prevented that from happening at a very low cost.
One person was killed in the process, and Iran was
(10:59):
prevented from developing, Iraq from developing bombs. Should the same
thing happen with Iran, would the Second World War have
been prevented? Had England and France invaded a Nazi Germany
in nineteen thirty five and killed Hitler, maybe that could
have prevented the Holocaust. Those are the kinds of issues
that I debate in this book. And there's no perfect
(11:20):
answer in a democracy, The perfect the imperfect answer is
given by the people.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
I mean, you talk about that in the book that
he wrote, mind confident. There was a moment where people
could have said, this guy's really dangerous. But how many
times are there at that moment in history where you
could have realized that someone was really dangerous or they
could have just said that? And you point out that
dictators in the past have made these radical claims that
(11:46):
they're going to go out and do something crazy, and
then they end up not doing that. So who could
have actually foreseen that Hitler would become who Hitler actually became.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Yeah, you brought up immigration.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
I want to talk about that a little bit because
there's this question of process right now. But I also
think that this book is very important when it comes
to this subject because this is a case of Joe Biden,
and I think there were a lot of pressures from
the left to say, we're just going to open it,
We're just going to throw the.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Doors wide open. I've had a lot of people say to.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
Me it's unfair that it takes so long to become
a legal citizen, but there is I mean, just as
people are complaining about due process, these people deserve due process.
The process of getting into the country has to go
through a court as well. There is a limited amount
of courts. There's a limited amount of time. How do
you please everybody when it comes to immigration, So you
(12:39):
can't do that.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
Many of my relatives came to the United States as
a result of immigration. They waited online. They waited five years,
six years, sometimes longer. I know, I've helped people become
Green card holders and citizens, and you know, it's the
greatest day in their life. My research assistant from Germany
recently became a citizen. Oh my god, it was like
(13:00):
you had a newborn baby. He was so happy he
was an American now, and he waited his turn. Had
he done it illegally, he might have been deported. And
so people have to make a decision. If you're willing
to wait online and do the right thing, you become
a citizen. If you cheat and you're caught, you don't
become a citizen. And there will be some false positives
(13:23):
and false negatives. We will allow on some people who
we shouldn't have allowed in, and we will deny some
people who we shouldn't have denied. It's inevitable, and the
book is all about this. The book is all about mistakes.
We always make mistakes. Police shoot too quickly, and if
they don't shoot quickly enough, they get shot. A friend
of mine, a very close friend of mine, a policeman,
Frank Burns, was shot and eventually killed because he hesitated
(13:47):
and didn't want to shoot. At a couple. The man
was holding the woman and the man was threatening the woman,
and if he shot, he might have killed the woman.
So he didn't shoot, and then the man shot him
and eventually killed him. That's the kind of decision that
policemen have to make every single day. The Supreme Court
yesterday nine to nothing rendered a decision about whether or
not the police can shoot somebody in a traffic stop.
(14:10):
And you know, people in robes very easy when you're
sitting in the Supreme Court with robes to second guests
of policeman who is nervous as hell, who has his
gun out, who understands that his best friend was shot
a year ago for not taking action, and he withholds
action and he gets shot, or he does it withhold
action and he shoots and he gets prosecuted. These are
the kinds of decisions that I focus on in my book,
(14:34):
and I try to suggest the new jurisprudence and new
way of thinking about this whole new phenomenon. You know,
we've spent thousands of years developing a jurisprudence for how
we respond to past crimes. But today, with for example,
spousal abuse, we have to figure out ways of protecting
women from abusive husbands or abusive boyfriends, whether it be
(14:55):
the case that's now pending in New York or cases
all over the country, and so so there have to
be mechanisms whereby women can leave their husbands and go
to safe places. Those of preventive measures that I write
about in the book too. You might think there's nothing
in common between climate control, vaccination, and a woman being
beat up by her husband, but there's a lot in common.
(15:18):
They're all preventive measures.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
We've got more coming up with Alan Dershowitz, but first
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Speaker 2 (16:36):
Got to do it now. Stay tuned. We've got more
for you after this.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
When we talk about preventive measures, we're talking right now
kind of nationally, but on the world stage, you also
have to take preventive measures. And right now Donald Trump
is getting praise and also some criticism for his engagement
in the Middle East, because we've got some people saying, well,
what does this do to Israel. There is this complaint
right now that he has said, you know, Cutter has
(17:03):
come to him and they've offered him this jet, and
he said, you know, this is a great gift.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
I personally see. And maybe I'm wrong. I'll give you
my interpretation.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
I think Donald Trump understands that when you go to
another country, you have to understand their culture, you have
to understand how to how to honor what they believe
is important. And they have offered him something. For him
to come out and say to the American people, they
offered me this, it's not safe, We're not taking it
would have stopped all talks immediately.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
Oh look, I had the same experience. I went to
katark at the request of the Emir, and the Emir
gave me a gift, and I gave it to Charity.
I took it though I would never turn it down
because that would be in something. But then how I
deal with it is my business, and so I gave
it to charity. And I think that Trump is doing
(17:53):
the same thing. He's not taking the airplane for himself,
He's taking it to use as president of the United
States and then it will either be turned over to
the library or it will be used by the future
president of the United Statess Air Force one. But I
completely agree you're very sensitive to this because I had
a lot of dealings with the Middle East. I worked
(18:13):
on the Abraham Accords, I worked on many of the
issues in the Middle East. You don't simply say no
to a Middle Eastern leader. By the way, you also
don't say no to Donald Trump. You know, you have
to understand who you're dealing with. And as a lawyer
for sixty years, I know how to deal with the
Supreme Court justice who is arguing with me, or a
(18:36):
judge or a prosecutor or a president. You have to
be tough and firm, but polite, and you have to
understand their culture. That's the key. Understanding their culture, and
that means do not turn down a gift.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Well, let me ask you about that, because in the
state of Michigan, we have a big Arab American community
and that's kind of been my experience when I go
and meet with them has been and you know you're
going to stay, you're going to have a meal together,
you might as well plan an entire day because they
are going to host you in a way that, you know,
the community.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
On the West side of Michigan may not be the same.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
We have a time frame that we're going to meet,
and it's going to be a quick meeting, and we're
going to go on with our day.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
You know, if I go over to Dearborn, it's.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Going to be an entire evening of spending time together,
getting to know each other, talking about our kids.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
It's a different culture. How does that play.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
Politically then in the country, Because I do I see
this as also a transactional relationship where it's like, well,
if you were.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
In office, if you were doing this, how could you
help us and how can how can we be a
part of what you're doing. I think that's a good thing,
though I do too.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
I was invited by the Prime Minister of the Palestinian
Authority to have lunch and I'm used to having lunch
in a half an hour, and I go to this restaurant. First,
there are arm guards all around me to protect me,
and then they bring out I would say, roughly speaking,
one hundred dishes they put on the table of every
(20:05):
conceivable food and I eat it all because it's fantastic,
and I figure I'm done. Then they bring out the
main course block and I finished lunch at four o'clock.
That's the culture of Palestinians who live in Ramaala, where
I spent those wonderful four hours. And so you know,
(20:28):
the Michigan is a very diverse society. I don't particularly
love some of the elected officials that have been that
have come out of Dearborn, but the people are wonderful.
And look, the Jewish people and the Palestinian people have
so much in common. They have both been victims of
(20:49):
persecution and double standards. I just hope for nothing more
than a peaceful resolution of the Israel Palestine Israel Israel
Muslim conflict, so that both countries can beat their swords
into plowshares and turn their nuclear weapons into nuclear medicine.
I think that Donald Trump has a plan for seeing
(21:11):
if that's at all possible by expanding the Abraham Accords.
And I hope you can bring that about without endangering
the Middle East and the world by allowing you on
to develop nuclear weapons.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
But that's what your book is all about.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
I mean, essentially, it's how do you do one without
causing a bad effect?
Speaker 2 (21:30):
With the other.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
And that to me, that's again why I say every
person in the political world should be reading this because
it is how you should think of everything, and it's
really how you I think today we have people that
run for office on emotion, and emotion can't rule the day,
especially when it comes to decision making at this level.
And that actually that was one of the things when
(21:53):
we've gone to the Arab American community in the state
of Michigan, I and I campaigned there a lot for
the president. One of the things that they would talk
to the people who were you know, a lot of
people would come to these rallies and there is a
lot of emotion around that issue, and it is something
that is to the average American foreign to us because
we don't live in a war zone. We can't even
imagine it, and you can easily get on one side
(22:16):
or the other without truly knowing the history of that region.
But overwhelmingly, the people who had family members there would
say to me, our belief is that Donald Trump will
go there and try to bring peace and stop the death.
That was what they wanted.
Speaker 3 (22:31):
Look, I agree, for example, yesterday Donald Trump shook hands
with the former dictator of al Kaeda, who's now the
president of Syria, And people say, oh my god, I
shouldn't reward terrorism. No, no, you have to be pragmatic.
And what Donald Trump does, he looks in the future,
and you know, you make peace with bad people. I
(22:53):
had dinner with the a mirror of Katar in Donald
Trump's hotel in New Jersey along with President Trump. And
you know, I have a lot of criticism of Katar.
But if he can help make priests, if he can
help bring about the hostages, if he can prevent another
October seventh, Hey, I'm on his side, and I'm prepared
(23:14):
to forgive him in the head of Syria for all
the things that they may have done in the past,
if they can help produce something in the future. That's
what prevention is all about. Prevention is all about striking
a balance. It means compromise, it means negotiation. It means
being willing to give up a little bit of freedom
for a lot of security, but never being willing to
(23:35):
give up a lot of freedom for a little bit
of security. And that's the thesis of the book. Benjamin
Franklin put it better than I did two hundred years ago,
but I try to build on Franklin's notion. And you know,
the subtitle of the book is about that the challenge
of preventing serious harms while preserving essential liberties. That is
(23:55):
a paraphrase of Benjamin Franklin. So yeah, this is a
new books one hundred and twenty five years old in
the sense that it reflects what our founders had in
mind for why we have a constitution that is intended
to strike that balance.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Well, and that's something that I think a lot of
people are sensitive to right now after the pandemic and
they feel like they were constrained. I mean, I went
to New York during the pandemic and we couldn't walk
in a restaurant.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
The streets were empty. It was it was a shocking time.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
But I think it was a shocking time because you know,
it just affected people's lives.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
The kids were out of school, everything.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
People are still panicked about, well, what if the executive
orders could do something that would stop everything from happening again.
And I think that's where when you see a lot
of power with one person, whether it be a governor
or a president. And this is why Donald Trump has
done a lot as president that has gone through executive order.
And you see Congress right now with a big, beautiful
(24:53):
bill trying to make some of these changes permanent to
the government. And I think that that's obviously we're seeing
the push and pull right now on that. How do
you take some of this out of executive orders and
have it in law without making taking away our liberties.
Speaker 3 (25:14):
Well, it's very easy. Congress has to step up to
the plate. They haven't been because they have a president
who they support. The House and the Senator are both
in the hands of Republicans. They've left it to executive order. Now,
that was Thomas Jefferson when he bought Louisiana. That was
President Lincoln when he suspended the rout of Habeas corpus.
That was Franklin Roosevelt. Some of the great presidents have
(25:38):
used executive orders because the legislature hasn't really stepped up.
The Article one of the Constitution gives the legislature the
primary power to make these decisions. But if the legislation
doesn't do it, or if there's an emergency, the president
has to do. It's subject to judicial review. That's our
wonderful system of checks and balances. You know, you're talk
(26:00):
about the pandemic. I still carry this around with me
in my pocket. I rarely wear it, but when I
go into the theater and it's very crowded, you know,
I'll still put it on as a preventive precaution. I'm
eighty six years old. I do not want to come
down with a COVID, and so at my age I
err on the side of wearing a mask. If I
were twenty six years old, I might very well air
(26:22):
on the side of not wearing the mask. So everything
is different, you know. Even we hear a lot about
due process. And in the book, I explain due process.
What does due process mean. What it means is the
process that's due to you based on who you are.
So if you're an American citizen and you're charged with
a crime, your due process is massive, you know, indictment,
(26:42):
presumption of innocence. But if you're an immigrant just across
the border and was caught, the only process that's due
to you is you have to be given a chance
to show you're an American citizen, and if you're not,
you're just taking back and put across the border again.
That's the process you're due. And so due process is
always going to be relative to who you are, what
(27:02):
actions the governments are taking, and how emergent these actions are.
And so our constitution is not a suicide pact. It's
a sliding scale of rights, privileges and concerns to make
sure we protect the interests of the people. Thomas Jefferson
said that. Abraham Lincoln said that, and I try to
(27:23):
emulate that in my book The Preventive State, where I
argue for a very pragmatic approach, very pragmatic. And it's
not surprising that the introduction to the book was written
by Steve Bryer. Justice Stephen Bryer, who was known as
the most pragmatic of the justices on the Court. He
loved the book because he said it was really pragmatic
and focus on liberty, but it also focus on the
(27:46):
essential goals of having a system of governance under law.
You know what they discovered at the Harvard Law Library
last week an original copy of the Magna Carter from
twelve fifteen. That was the original charter that gave us
our rid of abus corpus do process, the rule of law,
and a range of other things. And the amazing thing
(28:07):
is it was sitting one hundred yards away from me
for the fifty years I was Harvard in the library,
and I never once saw it or even knew it
was there.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
That's incredible.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
Let's take a quick commercial break. We'll continue next on
a Tutor Dixon podcast. Honestly, it's been such a joy
to sit here and talk to you and learn from you,
and I can see why your students loved you so much.
But before we end, I want to go over one
more thing, because we're suddenly hearing all these reporters are
(28:38):
coming out with these books about who the true Joe
Biden was the last four years, and we're suddenly hearing oh,
talks of he should have been in a wheelchair and
all of this. And like I said, the President over
this past week has been in the Middle East, and
now prominent Democrats are coming out and saying, look what
it's like when you don't have somebody that's brain dead.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
They've actually said that.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
They knew that we law four years in this country.
First of all, how much damage has that done to us?
And is it something that President Trump is able to
quickly reverse?
Speaker 3 (29:10):
Well, look, I knew Joe Biden for fifty years, and
he always started he always had difficulties word finding. Obviously
it got much worse in the last several years. And
I think that the people around him had an obligation,
just the way people around Ronald Reagan had an obligation
to disclose his Alzheimer's toward the end of his life,
(29:33):
and Woodrow Wilson, his wife, didn't disclose. People love to
hang on to power and will never know what we
lost because there's one thing to say, oh, he did
something wrong. We don't know whether try whether or not
Biden did anything wrong, but maybe he failed to do
things that he could have done. When you compare Joe
Biden's last months in office with Donald Trump's first months
(29:57):
in office, you see incredible differences. And so did we
lose something, Yes, And did the people around Donald Biden
fail us? Yes, they did. They should have been more
honest and more open. And I think the American people
have a right to be complaining about that. But you know,
(30:20):
it's non partisan. That's why we have our twenty fifth Amendment,
because we know that nobody is irreplaceable and nobody is
beyond the possibility of getting sick. Franklin Dona Roosevelt, his
last month in office, he was very, very sick. We've
had at least four or five presidents who have not
functioned up to their expected capacity. But it's much more
(30:44):
visible now with social media, with television, with the debate.
I mean, obviously, so the debate understood that we have
a president who is not functioning at full capacity. But
let me tell you one thing about Joe Biden. He's
a nice guy. He's a nice guy. I've known him
for years. He's kind and he thinks well of people.
(31:06):
He's a very nice man. But by the way, so
was Donald Trump. I've known Donald Trump for many years
as well. If you have a problem with a family
member or anything like that, Donald Trump is the first
guy who's going to call you every day, who's going
to worry with you about whether your child or your family.
I know from personal experience that that's true. It was
(31:28):
not true of Barack Obama, who was not a nice
guy and didn't care about other people and friends. So
he may have been you know, people think he may
have been a good president. But when you know people personally,
and I've known every president of the United States over
the past since since John Kennedy was a president. The
first person I ever voted for. You can judge people
(31:50):
on two criteria, how great a president were they? Were
they nice guys? Were they know people? I hope pretty
soon we can say were they nice women? I want
to see you, I want to see we're ready for president?
So maybe you know you get back into politics. Who knows?
Speaker 4 (32:05):
Well?
Speaker 2 (32:05):
I know.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
I think what you're saying is incredibly important, and I
think we saw that. You know, it's hard because there's
so much drama around the discussion of should he have
been in office? But I think that we saw that
very clearly after the debate because of the reactions of
people who truly knew him on TV. You saw people
tearing up. You saw people saying, this isn't the Joe
(32:26):
that I knew. And people who aren't nice people don't care.
They don't even come out in comment.
Speaker 3 (32:33):
Tell you a story. So I'm in the White House
for a Hnneka party. Biden is the vice president. This
is years ago, and my phone rings and you're not
supposed to have your phone on it, and he says Alan,
I said, oh, my grandson is about to learn whether
he got into Harvard or not. He said, take the call.
Take the call. Pall and my grandson says, I got
into Harvard, and Joe Biden grabs the phone for me,
(32:55):
and he asked me what my grandson's name is. I
say Lyle and vice Praisie, and I say, says.
Speaker 4 (33:01):
Good job, congratulations getting into Harvard. Now do the smart thing.
Go to the University of Delaware. It's a much better school, Biden.
He is very friendly. And by the way, he's probably
right now about Harvard and the University of Delaware. Harvard
has become very diminished and very broken. And state schools,
(33:24):
many schools now have improved enormously. And I'm giving up
graduation speech soon at a university. I'm going to be
talking a lot about what's happened to IV's, what's happened.
Speaker 3 (33:36):
To elite schools, and how important it is to have
the federal government and state governments exercise some degree of
control over what's going on in these campuses. The inmates
cannot be allowed to run the asylum.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Right well, I mean, and that is a perfect segue
to your book, because this is the question, how do
you prevent that. Let's just talk about this one more
time before you go. It's the preventative state. The challenge
of preventing serious harms while preserving essential liberties.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
Where can people get it?
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Amazon's available now literally pub date I think was this week,
and so you can get it. It was a top
bestseller on new releases, and so I'm hoping people will
buy it. More importantly, I'm hoping people will read it.
I'm hoping it will influence the debate, and I hope
it will influence young members of Congress and other elected
(34:33):
officials to understanding that we're moving to a new phase
in our history of the world, much more to it
prevention and away from reaction, and we have to make
sure we understand. And there's a lot in the book
about artificial intelligence and how artificial intelligence both poses dangers
and also poses potential prevention and relief from the dangers
(34:55):
because artificial intelligence gives us a better ability to predict
the dangers of the future. So it's very much a
contemporary book which takes into account all the developments in
modern science.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
I mean, but it is starting to look like Minority Report,
that movie where they could prevent things from happening. But
then you had the question of are you arresting people
before crime is committed?
Speaker 2 (35:19):
And they're not really.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
It's fascinating, but honestly, I do think that no matter
what level of government, whether you are on the local
county commission, if you were in your state legislature, if
you are a US Senator, a US congresswoman or man,
then you should read this because it was. It's very
valuable to me as I'm reading through it and I'm
thinking about my own state and the things that have
(35:42):
gone wrong, but the things that we have to do
to make it right. It's a different world. You're right,
so I appreciate it. Thank you so much for being
on today, Alan Dershowitz.
Speaker 3 (35:50):
Thank you for your brilliant questions, and I really appreciate
your having me on the show.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
Thanks, thank you, and thank you all for joining us
on the Tutor Dixon Podcast. For this episode and others,
go to Tutor Dixon podcast dot com, the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
Have a blessed day,
Welcome to the Tutor Dixon Podcast. We have the great
Alan Dershowitz with us today. He has a new book
coming out called The Preventative State, The Challenge of Preventing
serious harms while preserving essential liberties.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
There it is, you see it, and I think it's
a very.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Good book to be talking about right now, Alan, because
of everything that's going.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
On in the world.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
Yeah, everything is about prevention. Deportation is about preventing violence.
Bombing Iran or making a deal with Iran is about
preventing them from getting nuclear weapons. Israel's actions and Goza,
controversial as they are, are intended to prevent the repetition
of October seventh. And in my book To Prevent a State,
(00:41):
I go through every conceivable active prevention, ranging from medical
intervention to climate intervention. I put them all together and
I create a conceptual framework for analyzing this major shift
that's going on in our society. Larry Summers, president of Harvard,
put it very well. He says, no one but Alan
(01:03):
Dershowitz would seek to bring common motive thought to issues
as the versus bail, climate change, and terrorism. And that's
what I try to do. Because I've noted a major change.
You know, we used to wait until horms occurred and
then we would go and punish them. Today the harms
are so serious nuclear, environmental, medical, that we move much earlier,
(01:24):
and we endanger civil liberties when we do that, we
also protect people. And the goal of my book is
to create a balance which allows the government to act
preventively but without denying essential civil liberties.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Now it's interesting, I mean I found it fascinating because
as I'm reading through it as somebody who's run for office,
that's really the thought process you go through with everything
that you everything in your platform, and what you're considering.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Okay, if we remove.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Taxes here, what is the ultimate effect of that? If
you prevent if you try to prevent school shootings, what
are you taking away?
Speaker 2 (02:01):
And you have a lot of that.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
One is one that's obviously very sensitive to me because
I have kids in school, Because I have parents who say,
I don't want to have my kids checked when they walked,
when they walk in the door, But then, well, don't
you want your kids to be safe?
Speaker 2 (02:15):
So you have to balance all that.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
Oh, I have a whole chapter in the book on
red flag laws. On these are rules that are designed
to prevent guns from falling into the hands of young
people who can use them in school shooting. So I
deal with that, and the red flag laws have prevented
some shootings, but they've also disarmed people who probably have
(02:38):
a right under the Second Amendment to bear arms. So
you know, there's no free lunch, and every time you
improve our safety, you risk the possibility of diminishing our liberty.
Benjamin Franklin put that very well two hundred years ago
when he said that giving up a little bit of
(02:59):
liberty for safety is a problem that we have to
deal with. In my view, if you give up just
a little bit and you get a lot in return,
that's a good trade off. But if you give up
a lot and you get very little in return, that's
not a good trade off. And so what I try
to do in this book for laymen, obviously for average readers,
(03:22):
is to suggest an approach of jurisprudence. For example, we
all know that when somebody is charged with murder, we say,
better ten guilty go free than one innocent be wrong.
You can find the ten to one ratio, which actually
comes from the Bible. But when it comes to preventing harms.
How many nine to elevens are we prepared to prevent
in exchange for how much intrusion into the rights of people?
(03:47):
That's the tradeoff. We haven't figured out a way of
analyzing that yet, and that's what I try to do
in the preventive State. And you know it's available now.
You can get it on Amazon. So I hope people
will read it and and get in touch with me
and give me input because this is a work in progress.
This is the first book on the jurisprudence of prevention,
and I hope it won't be the last book. I
(04:08):
hope it will start others asking questions about this, including
elected officials.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
I think that is that's the most valuable part about it,
is you start to think more deeply about it.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
And I think oftentimes when.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
We do make new laws, I always say it's the
unintended consequences of the laws that people years later say, oh,
how did this happen?
Speaker 2 (04:31):
And now we can't do this and we can't do that.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
But I look back at the Founding Fathers and you
talk about that quote, and I think, you know, they
were much closer to oppression than we were. I mean,
they had lived it, so they understood it from a
different point of view. And I think oftentimes, especially the
youngest generation that's coming up in Congress today, you know,
the people in their twenties and their thirties, I think
(04:56):
they're quick to say, we want to protect everybody, and
so they don't always think about those unintended consequences.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
This book is I mean.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
Honestly, this is what makes you go there is so
much more to contemplate when you are making the decision
to do something as radical as create a new law.
And I know people say, oh, we're making new laws
every day, but you should think of it as radical
because you're changing the law. You should make sure that
you know everything about you've thought it through every possible way.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
But I don't know if we're doing that. And this
made me think that.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
Too many of us believe in that T shirt that
says just do it. I want to have it says
think about it first and then do it. Take, for example,
the obvious problem of what do you do with somebody
who's arrested for a crime but it's presumed innocent. Do
you keep him in jail pending trial or not? And
if you do keep him in jail. We'll never know
whether he would have committed a crime. But if you
(05:55):
let him out and he commits a crime, that's very visible,
and the judge says, oh my god, look what I've done.
And so the inclination is to lock them up when
in doubt, throw away the key. And I do an
analysis that shows that a lot of people have spent
a lot of years in prison for things they never
would have done and never did do. And so we
(06:15):
have to focus both on the innocent and the guilty,
on prevention, but also on not denying people basic liberties
or we won't live through the COVID. And there were
mandatory injections and some people got sick as the result
of it. And I quote a letter from George Washington
to his troops. I actually own the letter, written in
(06:38):
the hand of Alexander Hamilton. It's on my wall, urging
all American troops during the Revolutionary War to be inoculated
against smallpox. Washington says, we won't lose this war to
the British, but we might lose it to smallpox if
every soldier doesn't get inoculated. And of course, back in
the day an oculation was not as safe as it
(06:58):
is today, and so for everything, we have to strike
a balance. For climate control, we lose jobs when we
get too green, but we lose climates when we don't
get green enough. So how do you make those very
difficult course benefit analyses? And what I do is provide
a framework for doing that based on my sixty years
(07:19):
of teaching. This is my magnum opus. You know, I'm
now eighty six years old and I've written fifty seven books,
but this is the most important one I wrote. It's
something I've been working on for sixty years. I started
teaching in the area of prevention when I got to
Harvard nineteen sixty four, and I probably taught thirty courses
(07:39):
on prevention over the years and probably gave one hundred lectures.
And so it's all summarized in this book, The Preventive State.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
I mean, it really should be required reading for anyone
who is considering running for office or anybody who's in
office right now. You brought up climate change and the
discussions around that. What we've done in Michigan, we've seen
that in a more aggressive manner because the governor has
come out and said she wants to be fully renewable
(08:08):
energy by twenty thirty five. That alone has really damaged
the ability for the state of Michigan to get new
businesses because there's that feeling of I don't know if
I will have energy, I don't know if I can
manufacture with this type of limitation. How do you talk
to because I think politics comes into this too. I
(08:29):
don't think that decision was based solely on this is
what's best for the environment. But also there's a lot
of pressures from the political outside to come in and
say you have to do this or we won't support you.
So how do you balance the politics of it with
the decision making.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
Oh, you're absolutely right, there are pressures on both sides.
If you don't do enough for the environment, we're gonna
have problems twenty years from now. But if you do
too much, we're gonna lose jobs now. And in the book,
I talk about the difference between acts that have an
packed immediately and acts that have an impact twenty years
from now. Politicians obviously care more about tomorrow in the
(09:06):
day after tomorrow than they care about months or years
from now, And the basic question is who decides. And
of course, in a democracy that people decide, and it's
always going to be a tradeoff. There are those who say,
and they may be right, that if you go green,
you can create new jobs. We'll prove it to us,
show us. But generally that isn't the case. Generally they
(09:28):
have to be trade offs, and generally you have to
give up something to get something. And that's what I
propose in the book, and I propose mechanisms for making
those decisions and how they get made. Should it be
the courts, should it be the legislature, Should it be
the governor, the executive, the president. These are all things
that are being debated now. For example, in the context
of deportation, we know that there are too many criminal
(09:52):
aliens in the United States who are endangering our people.
We see it every day, and they're very visible. When
an alien, an illegal alien, commits a rape, for a
murderers the front page in the story. And yet there
are many who don't, who live good lives. And so
what we have to do is create more visibility on
both sides and let America make the decision. We are
(10:15):
a nation of immigrants, but we are a nation of
legal immigrants, and so we have to pose the question
in the context of deportation and President Trump's about to
mega decision today or tomorrow. Should he bomb Iran's nuclear facilities?
That would be completely preventive. It's called the Beagan doctrine
because monk and began when he was the Prime Minister
(10:36):
of Israel decided to bomb Iraq's nuclear reactor, which saved many,
many American lives. Because when America went into Iran. Can
you imagine what would have happened if one hundred thousand
American troops were greeted by nuclear weapons from Iran? But
Israel prevented that from happening at a very low cost.
One person was killed in the process, and Iran was
(10:59):
prevented from developing, Iraq from developing bombs. Should the same
thing happen with Iran, would the Second World War have
been prevented? Had England and France invaded a Nazi Germany
in nineteen thirty five and killed Hitler, maybe that could
have prevented the Holocaust. Those are the kinds of issues
that I debate in this book. And there's no perfect
(11:20):
answer in a democracy, The perfect the imperfect answer is
given by the people.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
I mean, you talk about that in the book that
he wrote, mind confident. There was a moment where people
could have said, this guy's really dangerous. But how many
times are there at that moment in history where you
could have realized that someone was really dangerous or they
could have just said that? And you point out that
dictators in the past have made these radical claims that
(11:46):
they're going to go out and do something crazy, and
then they end up not doing that. So who could
have actually foreseen that Hitler would become who Hitler actually became.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Yeah, you brought up immigration.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
I want to talk about that a little bit because
there's this question of process right now. But I also
think that this book is very important when it comes
to this subject because this is a case of Joe Biden,
and I think there were a lot of pressures from
the left to say, we're just going to open it,
We're just going to throw the.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Doors wide open. I've had a lot of people say to.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
Me it's unfair that it takes so long to become
a legal citizen, but there is I mean, just as
people are complaining about due process, these people deserve due process.
The process of getting into the country has to go
through a court as well. There is a limited amount
of courts. There's a limited amount of time. How do
you please everybody when it comes to immigration, So you
(12:39):
can't do that.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
Many of my relatives came to the United States as
a result of immigration. They waited online. They waited five years,
six years, sometimes longer. I know, I've helped people become
Green card holders and citizens, and you know, it's the
greatest day in their life. My research assistant from Germany
recently became a citizen. Oh my god, it was like
(13:00):
you had a newborn baby. He was so happy he
was an American now, and he waited his turn. Had
he done it illegally, he might have been deported. And
so people have to make a decision. If you're willing
to wait online and do the right thing, you become
a citizen. If you cheat and you're caught, you don't
become a citizen. And there will be some false positives
(13:23):
and false negatives. We will allow on some people who
we shouldn't have allowed in, and we will deny some
people who we shouldn't have denied. It's inevitable, and the
book is all about this. The book is all about mistakes.
We always make mistakes. Police shoot too quickly, and if
they don't shoot quickly enough, they get shot. A friend
of mine, a very close friend of mine, a policeman,
Frank Burns, was shot and eventually killed because he hesitated
(13:47):
and didn't want to shoot. At a couple. The man
was holding the woman and the man was threatening the woman,
and if he shot, he might have killed the woman.
So he didn't shoot, and then the man shot him
and eventually killed him. That's the kind of decision that
policemen have to make every single day. The Supreme Court
yesterday nine to nothing rendered a decision about whether or
not the police can shoot somebody in a traffic stop.
(14:10):
And you know, people in robes very easy when you're
sitting in the Supreme Court with robes to second guests
of policeman who is nervous as hell, who has his
gun out, who understands that his best friend was shot
a year ago for not taking action, and he withholds
action and he gets shot, or he does it withhold
action and he shoots and he gets prosecuted. These are
the kinds of decisions that I focus on in my book,
(14:34):
and I try to suggest the new jurisprudence and new
way of thinking about this whole new phenomenon. You know,
we've spent thousands of years developing a jurisprudence for how
we respond to past crimes. But today, with for example,
spousal abuse, we have to figure out ways of protecting
women from abusive husbands or abusive boyfriends, whether it be
(14:55):
the case that's now pending in New York or cases
all over the country, and so so there have to
be mechanisms whereby women can leave their husbands and go
to safe places. Those of preventive measures that I write
about in the book too. You might think there's nothing
in common between climate control, vaccination, and a woman being
beat up by her husband, but there's a lot in common.
(15:18):
They're all preventive measures.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
We've got more coming up with Alan Dershowitz, but first
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Speaker 2 (16:36):
Got to do it now. Stay tuned. We've got more
for you after this.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
When we talk about preventive measures, we're talking right now
kind of nationally, but on the world stage, you also
have to take preventive measures. And right now Donald Trump
is getting praise and also some criticism for his engagement
in the Middle East, because we've got some people saying, well,
what does this do to Israel. There is this complaint
right now that he has said, you know, Cutter has
(17:03):
come to him and they've offered him this jet, and
he said, you know, this is a great gift.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
I personally see. And maybe I'm wrong. I'll give you
my interpretation.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
I think Donald Trump understands that when you go to
another country, you have to understand their culture, you have
to understand how to how to honor what they believe
is important. And they have offered him something. For him
to come out and say to the American people, they
offered me this, it's not safe, We're not taking it
would have stopped all talks immediately.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
Oh look, I had the same experience. I went to
katark at the request of the Emir, and the Emir
gave me a gift, and I gave it to Charity.
I took it though I would never turn it down
because that would be in something. But then how I
deal with it is my business, and so I gave
it to charity. And I think that Trump is doing
(17:53):
the same thing. He's not taking the airplane for himself,
He's taking it to use as president of the United
States and then it will either be turned over to
the library or it will be used by the future
president of the United Statess Air Force one. But I
completely agree you're very sensitive to this because I had
a lot of dealings with the Middle East. I worked
(18:13):
on the Abraham Accords, I worked on many of the
issues in the Middle East. You don't simply say no
to a Middle Eastern leader. By the way, you also
don't say no to Donald Trump. You know, you have
to understand who you're dealing with. And as a lawyer
for sixty years, I know how to deal with the
Supreme Court justice who is arguing with me, or a
(18:36):
judge or a prosecutor or a president. You have to
be tough and firm, but polite, and you have to
understand their culture. That's the key. Understanding their culture, and
that means do not turn down a gift.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Well, let me ask you about that, because in the
state of Michigan, we have a big Arab American community
and that's kind of been my experience when I go
and meet with them has been and you know you're
going to stay, you're going to have a meal together,
you might as well plan an entire day because they
are going to host you in a way that, you know,
the community.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
On the West side of Michigan may not be the same.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
We have a time frame that we're going to meet,
and it's going to be a quick meeting, and we're
going to go on with our day.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
You know, if I go over to Dearborn, it's.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Going to be an entire evening of spending time together,
getting to know each other, talking about our kids.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
It's a different culture. How does that play.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
Politically then in the country, Because I do I see
this as also a transactional relationship where it's like, well,
if you were.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
In office, if you were doing this, how could you
help us and how can how can we be a
part of what you're doing. I think that's a good thing,
though I do too.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
I was invited by the Prime Minister of the Palestinian
Authority to have lunch and I'm used to having lunch
in a half an hour, and I go to this restaurant. First,
there are arm guards all around me to protect me,
and then they bring out I would say, roughly speaking,
one hundred dishes they put on the table of every
(20:05):
conceivable food and I eat it all because it's fantastic,
and I figure I'm done. Then they bring out the
main course block and I finished lunch at four o'clock.
That's the culture of Palestinians who live in Ramaala, where
I spent those wonderful four hours. And so you know,
(20:28):
the Michigan is a very diverse society. I don't particularly
love some of the elected officials that have been that
have come out of Dearborn, but the people are wonderful.
And look, the Jewish people and the Palestinian people have
so much in common. They have both been victims of
(20:49):
persecution and double standards. I just hope for nothing more
than a peaceful resolution of the Israel Palestine Israel Israel
Muslim conflict, so that both countries can beat their swords
into plowshares and turn their nuclear weapons into nuclear medicine.
I think that Donald Trump has a plan for seeing
(21:11):
if that's at all possible by expanding the Abraham Accords.
And I hope you can bring that about without endangering
the Middle East and the world by allowing you on
to develop nuclear weapons.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
But that's what your book is all about.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
I mean, essentially, it's how do you do one without
causing a bad effect?
Speaker 2 (21:30):
With the other.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
And that to me, that's again why I say every
person in the political world should be reading this because
it is how you should think of everything, and it's
really how you I think today we have people that
run for office on emotion, and emotion can't rule the day,
especially when it comes to decision making at this level.
And that actually that was one of the things when
(21:53):
we've gone to the Arab American community in the state
of Michigan, I and I campaigned there a lot for
the president. One of the things that they would talk
to the people who were you know, a lot of
people would come to these rallies and there is a
lot of emotion around that issue, and it is something
that is to the average American foreign to us because
we don't live in a war zone. We can't even
imagine it, and you can easily get on one side
(22:16):
or the other without truly knowing the history of that region.
But overwhelmingly, the people who had family members there would
say to me, our belief is that Donald Trump will
go there and try to bring peace and stop the death.
That was what they wanted.
Speaker 3 (22:31):
Look, I agree, for example, yesterday Donald Trump shook hands
with the former dictator of al Kaeda, who's now the
president of Syria, And people say, oh my god, I
shouldn't reward terrorism. No, no, you have to be pragmatic.
And what Donald Trump does, he looks in the future,
and you know, you make peace with bad people. I
(22:53):
had dinner with the a mirror of Katar in Donald
Trump's hotel in New Jersey along with President Trump. And
you know, I have a lot of criticism of Katar.
But if he can help make priests, if he can
help bring about the hostages, if he can prevent another
October seventh, Hey, I'm on his side, and I'm prepared
(23:14):
to forgive him in the head of Syria for all
the things that they may have done in the past,
if they can help produce something in the future. That's
what prevention is all about. Prevention is all about striking
a balance. It means compromise, it means negotiation. It means
being willing to give up a little bit of freedom
for a lot of security, but never being willing to
(23:35):
give up a lot of freedom for a little bit
of security. And that's the thesis of the book. Benjamin
Franklin put it better than I did two hundred years ago,
but I try to build on Franklin's notion. And you know,
the subtitle of the book is about that the challenge
of preventing serious harms while preserving essential liberties. That is
(23:55):
a paraphrase of Benjamin Franklin. So yeah, this is a
new books one hundred and twenty five years old in
the sense that it reflects what our founders had in
mind for why we have a constitution that is intended
to strike that balance.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Well, and that's something that I think a lot of
people are sensitive to right now after the pandemic and
they feel like they were constrained. I mean, I went
to New York during the pandemic and we couldn't walk
in a restaurant.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
The streets were empty. It was it was a shocking time.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
But I think it was a shocking time because you know,
it just affected people's lives.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
The kids were out of school, everything.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
People are still panicked about, well, what if the executive
orders could do something that would stop everything from happening again.
And I think that's where when you see a lot
of power with one person, whether it be a governor
or a president. And this is why Donald Trump has
done a lot as president that has gone through executive order.
And you see Congress right now with a big, beautiful
(24:53):
bill trying to make some of these changes permanent to
the government. And I think that that's obviously we're seeing
the push and pull right now on that. How do
you take some of this out of executive orders and
have it in law without making taking away our liberties.
Speaker 3 (25:14):
Well, it's very easy. Congress has to step up to
the plate. They haven't been because they have a president
who they support. The House and the Senator are both
in the hands of Republicans. They've left it to executive order. Now,
that was Thomas Jefferson when he bought Louisiana. That was
President Lincoln when he suspended the rout of Habeas corpus.
That was Franklin Roosevelt. Some of the great presidents have
(25:38):
used executive orders because the legislature hasn't really stepped up.
The Article one of the Constitution gives the legislature the
primary power to make these decisions. But if the legislation
doesn't do it, or if there's an emergency, the president
has to do. It's subject to judicial review. That's our
wonderful system of checks and balances. You know, you're talk
(26:00):
about the pandemic. I still carry this around with me
in my pocket. I rarely wear it, but when I
go into the theater and it's very crowded, you know,
I'll still put it on as a preventive precaution. I'm
eighty six years old. I do not want to come
down with a COVID, and so at my age I
err on the side of wearing a mask. If I
were twenty six years old, I might very well air
(26:22):
on the side of not wearing the mask. So everything
is different, you know. Even we hear a lot about
due process. And in the book, I explain due process.
What does due process mean. What it means is the
process that's due to you based on who you are.
So if you're an American citizen and you're charged with
a crime, your due process is massive, you know, indictment,
(26:42):
presumption of innocence. But if you're an immigrant just across
the border and was caught, the only process that's due
to you is you have to be given a chance
to show you're an American citizen, and if you're not,
you're just taking back and put across the border again.
That's the process you're due. And so due process is
always going to be relative to who you are, what
(27:02):
actions the governments are taking, and how emergent these actions are.
And so our constitution is not a suicide pact. It's
a sliding scale of rights, privileges and concerns to make
sure we protect the interests of the people. Thomas Jefferson
said that. Abraham Lincoln said that, and I try to
(27:23):
emulate that in my book The Preventive State, where I
argue for a very pragmatic approach, very pragmatic. And it's
not surprising that the introduction to the book was written
by Steve Bryer. Justice Stephen Bryer, who was known as
the most pragmatic of the justices on the Court. He
loved the book because he said it was really pragmatic
and focus on liberty, but it also focus on the
(27:46):
essential goals of having a system of governance under law.
You know what they discovered at the Harvard Law Library
last week an original copy of the Magna Carter from
twelve fifteen. That was the original charter that gave us
our rid of abus corpus do process, the rule of law,
and a range of other things. And the amazing thing
(28:07):
is it was sitting one hundred yards away from me
for the fifty years I was Harvard in the library,
and I never once saw it or even knew it
was there.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
That's incredible.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
Let's take a quick commercial break. We'll continue next on
a Tutor Dixon podcast. Honestly, it's been such a joy
to sit here and talk to you and learn from you,
and I can see why your students loved you so much.
But before we end, I want to go over one
more thing, because we're suddenly hearing all these reporters are
(28:38):
coming out with these books about who the true Joe
Biden was the last four years, and we're suddenly hearing oh,
talks of he should have been in a wheelchair and
all of this. And like I said, the President over
this past week has been in the Middle East, and
now prominent Democrats are coming out and saying, look what
it's like when you don't have somebody that's brain dead.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
They've actually said that.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
They knew that we law four years in this country.
First of all, how much damage has that done to us?
And is it something that President Trump is able to
quickly reverse?
Speaker 3 (29:10):
Well, look, I knew Joe Biden for fifty years, and
he always started he always had difficulties word finding. Obviously
it got much worse in the last several years. And
I think that the people around him had an obligation,
just the way people around Ronald Reagan had an obligation
to disclose his Alzheimer's toward the end of his life,
(29:33):
and Woodrow Wilson, his wife, didn't disclose. People love to
hang on to power and will never know what we
lost because there's one thing to say, oh, he did
something wrong. We don't know whether try whether or not
Biden did anything wrong, but maybe he failed to do
things that he could have done. When you compare Joe
Biden's last months in office with Donald Trump's first months
(29:57):
in office, you see incredible differences. And so did we
lose something, Yes, And did the people around Donald Biden
fail us? Yes, they did. They should have been more
honest and more open. And I think the American people
have a right to be complaining about that. But you know,
(30:20):
it's non partisan. That's why we have our twenty fifth Amendment,
because we know that nobody is irreplaceable and nobody is
beyond the possibility of getting sick. Franklin Dona Roosevelt, his
last month in office, he was very, very sick. We've
had at least four or five presidents who have not
functioned up to their expected capacity. But it's much more
(30:44):
visible now with social media, with television, with the debate.
I mean, obviously, so the debate understood that we have
a president who is not functioning at full capacity. But
let me tell you one thing about Joe Biden. He's
a nice guy. He's a nice guy. I've known him
for years. He's kind and he thinks well of people.
(31:06):
He's a very nice man. But by the way, so
was Donald Trump. I've known Donald Trump for many years
as well. If you have a problem with a family
member or anything like that, Donald Trump is the first
guy who's going to call you every day, who's going
to worry with you about whether your child or your family.
I know from personal experience that that's true. It was
(31:28):
not true of Barack Obama, who was not a nice
guy and didn't care about other people and friends. So
he may have been you know, people think he may
have been a good president. But when you know people personally,
and I've known every president of the United States over
the past since since John Kennedy was a president. The
first person I ever voted for. You can judge people
(31:50):
on two criteria, how great a president were they? Were
they nice guys? Were they know people? I hope pretty
soon we can say were they nice women? I want
to see you, I want to see we're ready for president?
So maybe you know you get back into politics. Who knows?
Speaker 4 (32:05):
Well?
Speaker 2 (32:05):
I know.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
I think what you're saying is incredibly important, and I
think we saw that. You know, it's hard because there's
so much drama around the discussion of should he have
been in office? But I think that we saw that
very clearly after the debate because of the reactions of
people who truly knew him on TV. You saw people
tearing up. You saw people saying, this isn't the Joe
(32:26):
that I knew. And people who aren't nice people don't care.
They don't even come out in comment.
Speaker 3 (32:33):
Tell you a story. So I'm in the White House
for a Hnneka party. Biden is the vice president. This
is years ago, and my phone rings and you're not
supposed to have your phone on it, and he says Alan,
I said, oh, my grandson is about to learn whether
he got into Harvard or not. He said, take the call.
Take the call. Pall and my grandson says, I got
into Harvard, and Joe Biden grabs the phone for me,
(32:55):
and he asked me what my grandson's name is. I
say Lyle and vice Praisie, and I say, says.
Speaker 4 (33:01):
Good job, congratulations getting into Harvard. Now do the smart thing.
Go to the University of Delaware. It's a much better school, Biden.
He is very friendly. And by the way, he's probably
right now about Harvard and the University of Delaware. Harvard
has become very diminished and very broken. And state schools,
(33:24):
many schools now have improved enormously. And I'm giving up
graduation speech soon at a university. I'm going to be
talking a lot about what's happened to IV's, what's happened.
Speaker 3 (33:36):
To elite schools, and how important it is to have
the federal government and state governments exercise some degree of
control over what's going on in these campuses. The inmates
cannot be allowed to run the asylum.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Right well, I mean, and that is a perfect segue
to your book, because this is the question, how do
you prevent that. Let's just talk about this one more
time before you go. It's the preventative state. The challenge
of preventing serious harms while preserving essential liberties.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
Where can people get it?
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Amazon's available now literally pub date I think was this week,
and so you can get it. It was a top
bestseller on new releases, and so I'm hoping people will
buy it. More importantly, I'm hoping people will read it.
I'm hoping it will influence the debate, and I hope
it will influence young members of Congress and other elected
(34:33):
officials to understanding that we're moving to a new phase
in our history of the world, much more to it
prevention and away from reaction, and we have to make
sure we understand. And there's a lot in the book
about artificial intelligence and how artificial intelligence both poses dangers
and also poses potential prevention and relief from the dangers
(34:55):
because artificial intelligence gives us a better ability to predict
the dangers of the future. So it's very much a
contemporary book which takes into account all the developments in
modern science.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
I mean, but it is starting to look like Minority Report,
that movie where they could prevent things from happening. But
then you had the question of are you arresting people
before crime is committed?
Speaker 2 (35:19):
And they're not really.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
It's fascinating, but honestly, I do think that no matter
what level of government, whether you are on the local
county commission, if you were in your state legislature, if
you are a US Senator, a US congresswoman or man,
then you should read this because it was. It's very
valuable to me as I'm reading through it and I'm
thinking about my own state and the things that have
(35:42):
gone wrong, but the things that we have to do
to make it right. It's a different world. You're right,
so I appreciate it. Thank you so much for being
on today, Alan Dershowitz.
Speaker 3 (35:50):
Thank you for your brilliant questions, and I really appreciate
your having me on the show.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
Thanks, thank you, and thank you all for joining us
on the Tutor Dixon Podcast. For this episode and others,
go to Tutor Dixon podcast dot com, the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
Have a blessed day,
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