Legal Research

Dershowitz On The Right to Silence

By Simon Fodden

Alan M. Dershowitz, that prolific (some would say prolix) law prof, publicity hound and sometime proponent of torture, has published his third book this year: Is There A Right To Remain Silent? Coercive Interrogation and the Fifth Amendment After 9/11. It gets a good review in the New York Times from Johnathon Mahler, who finds the book for the mostpart accessible by lay readers and, where it becomes dense with constitutional law, worth pushing ahead even so.

The description on the Oxford University Press page says this of the book:

…Dershowitz puts forward a bold reinterpretation of the Fifth Amendment for the post-9/11 world. As the world we live in changes from a “deterrent state” to the heightened vigilance of today’s “preventative state,” our construction, he argues, must also change. We must develop a jurisprudence that will contain both substantive and procedural rules for all actions taken by government officials in order to prevent harmful conduct-including terrorism.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on September 13, 2008 (boomark / email).