| --- |
| title: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12) (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017167)" |
| source: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12)" |
| sourceUrl: "https://www.justice.gov/epstein" |
| date: "2026-01-01" |
| category: "House Oversight" |
| eftaNumber: "HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017167" |
| ocrPages: 1 |
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| parseTier: "external-legacy" |
| engine: "engine undisclosed (ep-nov-12.greg.technology mirror)" |
| externalSource: "greg-ep-nov-12" |
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| externalCredit: "ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| externalUrl: "https://ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| --- |
| |
| 4.2.12 |
| WC: 191694 |
| Kosslyn on Neurobiology and the Law; a large class with Professor Steven Pinker on the subject |
| of Taboos; and a series of freshman seminars entitled Where Does Your Morality Come From? |
| My teaching and academic writing have centered on several overarching themes. Between my |
| earliest articles on the preventive detention of the dangerously mentally ill and my recent series of |
| books on the prevention of terrorism, my major academic focus has been on prediction and |
| prevention of harmful conduct. I've taught numerous classes about that and related issues. The |
| writings ranged from the preemption and prevention of harmful conduct by the mentally ill, to the |
| effort to predict which kinds of speeches and writings might lead to violence. They included |
| articles and books on preventive detention of suspected terrorists, preventive interrogation and |
| surveillance methods designed to secure real-time intelligence information necessary to prevent |
| terrorism, preemptive military actions, pre-trial detention of ordinary criminals, preventive genetic |
| testing and inoculation, preventive character testing,23 and preventive profiling. As to all of these |
| issues, I have sought to balance the imperatives of due process, liberty and decency, against the |
| legitimate needs of national security and crime prevention. I coined the term "The Preventive |
| State" and have been thinking, teaching and writing about its increasing dangers for half a |
| century. I believe I was the first academic to focus on this problem in a systematic way. |
| The overt text of many of my books, articles and classes dealt in large part with the substantive |
| and procedural issues growing out of prediction and prevention of harmful conduct-the |
| movement we are experiencing toward "the preventive state" — and the jurisprudential problems |
| associated with this movement. There is, however, a more subtle subtext that runs through not |
| only the writings about prevention, but virtually all my other writings as well. |
| This subtext is the need in a democracy for openly articulated criteria and standards, whenever |
| states (or state-like institutions) take actions that affect the rights of individuals whether these |
| actions are preventive or reactive in nature. This need may seem obvious, since democracy |
| cannot operate in the absence of visibility and accountability. Yet in virtually all of the areas |
| about which I have chosen to write and teach, the criteria and standards for government action |
| have been unarticulated or hidden from public view. Moreover, there have been some who have |
| argued that it is wiser, even in a democracy, sometimes to hide from public view (and hence |
| public scrutiny) what the government is doing.24 |
| Some governmental decisions and actions must, of course, be kept secret, at least for a time. |
| Espionage activities, weapon development, military planning and the like must, by their very |
| nature, be kept under wraps if they are to succeed. But broad policy decisions should, in a |
| democracy, be subjected to the checks and balances not only by the other branches of |
| 22 See Alan Dershowitz, Finding Jefferson (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008). |
| 23 See Alan Dershowitz, "Preventive Disbarment: The Numbers Are Against It," American Bar Association |
| Journal 58 (Aug. 1972): 815. |
| 24 As I wrote in Why Terrorism Works: |
| In my debates with two prominent civil libertarians, Floyd Abrams and Harvey Silverglate, both have |
| acknowledged that they would want nonlethal torture to be used if it could prevent thousands of deaths, |
| but they did not want torture to be officially recognized by our legal system. As Abrams put it: "In a |
| democracy sometimes it is necessary to do things off the books and below the radar screen." |
| Alan Dershowitz, Why Terrorism Works (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002): 151. See also Richard Posner, |
| Quoted pp |
| 80 |
| HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017167 |
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