Dershowitz Visits FSU Law Seminar
Alan Dershowitz speaks to students in FSU Law's Civil Liberties in the Digital Age class.
On Tuesday, February 27, Alan Dershowitz, the Felix Frankfurter professor of law emeritus at Harvard Law School and a renowned litigator, visited the Civil Liberties in the Digital Age seminar, a class offered by the College of Law’s Institute of Law, Technology & Innovation. Dershowitz discussed his forthcoming book on “the preventive state”—or as he describes it, “the challenge of predicting and preventing cataclysmic harms without granting too much power to government,” and students in the seminar were able to read a portion of the unpublished manuscript. Students asked Dershowitz questions about free speech, social media censorship, discourse on campus, the moral and ethical dimensions of representing clients, and other subjects. FSU President Emeritus John Thrasher and FSU Law Visiting Professor Jules Coleman participated in the seminar as well, engaging in a spirited exchange with Dershowitz on some of the philosophical elements of free speech. Past and future sessions of the Civil Liberties in the Digital Age seminar include several accomplished guest speakers and cover topics such as law and technology in the workplace, artificial intelligence and deepfakes, gene editing, and data and information privacy.