Word: boros
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...predicament of two teenage brothers on death row for murders their father committed with them helplessly in tow reads like a thriller. (It's also one case Dershowitz has yet to win.) He does spend a little too much time harking back to his Brooklyn roots in Boro Park, and his puns inspire cringes. But on the whole, it's surprisingly crisp, and modest...
Dershowitz has been contentious since his boyhood in Brooklyn's Boro Park section, but his intellectual powers were rarely applied to schoolwork. "You know, Alan," said his high school principal once, "you're very dumb, but you're very verbal. The only thing you can be is a lawyer." At Brooklyn College, Dershowitz suddenly became a serious student. He went on to Yale Law School, where he had what he calls "my first experience with anti-Semitism." The top student in his class, he applied to 32 Wall Street firms for a summer...
Perhaps that is because he has been unable to resist opportunities to practice what he teaches. The first came in 1972. His client: a Boro Park contemporary facing murder charges after having made a bomb for the Jewish Defense League. Dershowitz eventually got his client off and began taking on other legal lepers. Now he laughingly asks, "Who else do you know who gets Christmas cards from murderers, rapists and residents of death row?" Not everyone is amused, not even in his own Boro Park, where one neighbor recently described him as "the one who used to be the troublemaker...