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Dershowitz on Wrongness, Law, Truth and Goldman Sachs

By Eric Lipman

If you haven't read Kathryn Schulz's interview with Alan Dershowitz at Slate, you should. It's the first in a series of interviews about "wrongness," which is the subject of Schulz's book, "Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error." (The interview is actually posted in two parts, and I've linked to the second, which deals more directly with error and its effect on law. Here's a link to part one.) In the interview, Dershowitz, not known for being shy, states unequivocally that the law ain't necessarily designed to figure out the truth: The law is agnostic about truth. It's very skeptical of ultimate truth. That's why freedom of speech permits lies to be told. Most liberal democracies don't try to figure out what the truth is. I would be very upset if my country, like Hobbes, decided there was truth. Hobbes said that one of the obligations of those who govern is to censor lies, because those who govern have unique access to the truth. That's not the American way. As a timely example of the law being shaped by wrongs, Dershowitz cites the Goldman Sachs case: So Goldman Sachs does something terrible. They get a man who was betting...

Full post as published by Legal Blog Watch on May 14, 2010 (boomark / email).