Election Controversy Subject of New Books

Law School Professor Alan M. Dershowitz has decided to join the leagues of authors working on books about the 2000 presidential campaign with a book of his own.

Not even two months have passed since the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its historic ruling that lead to President Bush's victory, but already three books have been published about the tumultuous election. Publishers say many more are in the works.

With Supreme Injustice, scheduled to be published by Oxford University Press this spring, Dershowitz said he is trying to reach not just an academic audience, but the common voter as well.

"This book is designed to explain to [the] millions of Americans who deep in their guts feel that the Supreme Court was wrong, why they are right," Dershowitz said yesterday.

And the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law has worked under a tight deadline before.

He wrote Reasonable Doubts: The Criminal Justice System and the O.J. Simpson Case, in a mere two months.

Dershowitz said his new book attempts to give his readers a legal justification for an opinion they already hold.

"The book is for the interested and concerned readers around the country and the world," he said.

Dershowitz said that he believes the Supreme Court's ruling will have a lasting effect on public opinion.

"The determining factor in [the Court's] vote was the names of the litigants. It's a terrible precedent. It delegitimizes the Court as an arbiter of fair decisions," he said.

Columbia Professor of Law Samuel Issacharoff, along with two other Constitutional law specialists, has published the first textbook about the 2000 presidential election--just in time for use in classes this spring.

When Elections Go Bad: The Law of Democracy and the Presidential Election of 2000 came out in January.

And Owen M. Fiss, Sterling Professor of Law at the Yale Law School, said he thinks the election and subsequent Supreme Court decision are important to teach in a law school setting, though he warns that their long-lasting legal effects should not be overestimated.

"The real question law teachers have to face now is the question of overreaction to it," Fiss said. "The court has made mistakes before, and transcended these mistakes."

--Staff Writer Lauren R. Dorgan can be reached at dorgan@fas.harvard.edu.