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Alan Dershowitz questions whether Supreme Court wants to solve damaging decision leak

Famed Harvard law professor says there are more aggressive tools the court could use to solve the case, including immunity and sweeping electronic devices.

Published: November 13, 2022 3:10pm

Updated: November 13, 2022 11:16pm

Over a half-century of law, Alan Dershowitz has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court and trained generations of lawyers who went on to be senators, judges and even clerks for the nation's nine justices.

And at this critical moment in history, he's worried the nation's high court isn't serious enough about solving the most serious threat to its credibility in decades: the unprecedented leak of the draft decision that eventually overturned Roe v Wade.

"I don't think that the Supreme Court is devoting the right resources to this," Dershowitz told the "Just the News, Not Noise" television show late last week. "They have to give people immunity. They have to get warrants for their laptops and for their cell phones. And they have to do the kind of investigation that produces results."

The famed attorney said he does not think the court's marshal's office has the resources to solve the leak, a point he first raised in a recent Wall Street Journal opinion article.

"Having the marshal's office do the investigation is unlikely to produce a result," he said. "... Maybe some of the justices don't want to solve this issue. Maybe they don't want to know that it was a law clerk. Maybe they'll think it'll cause further divisiveness."

The Harvard law professor noted the leak's consequences were massive and went far beyond damaging the court's credibility and trust. It also motivated one deranged man to attempt to kill Justice Brett Kavanaugh in an attack thwarted by police near the associate justice's home. 

"That leak almost caused the death of a justice to the Supreme Court," he noted. "You get somebody who heard about the leak and says, 'If I kill a justice who is going to vote for the overruling of Roe, maybe the decision will be different.' And he went on the lawn of Kavanaugh's house with guns and with knives. And thank God he was caught. This is a very serious matter."

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