This list of Harvard Law faculty's books includes three by Alan Dershowitz. Three in a year. I love a cigar but sometimes I take it out of my mouth, Groucho said (he was talking to a guy on the $64,000 Question who had like 17 children).
Adam Horowitz fills in: You have plenty of time for smoking cigars while other people write your books for you (at just over minimum wage) (From the magazine 02138, cached here). Money quote:
Dershowitz is, however, notorious on the law school campus for his use
of researchers. (The law school itself is particularly known for this
practice, probably because lawyers are used to having paralegals and
clerks who do significant research and writing; students familiar with
several law school professors' writing processes say that Dershowitz
reflects the norm in principle, if to a greater degree in practice.)
Dershowitz generally employs one or two full-time researchers, three or
four part-timers, and a handful of students who do occasional workâall
paid at $11.50 per hour. (Since Dershowitz doesn't get enough in the
$7,500/year research budget the law school accords him, he often has to
pay that hourly rate out of his own pocket.) Several students who have
worked with him describe his hiring practices as almost
arbitraryâbarely looking at résumés, hiring anyone who asks him for a
job, sometimes having his wife interview applicants, and often
forgetting those who've worked with him in the past. One long-serving
researcher was a local high-school student.
scholarly convention of researching first, then drawing conclusions.
Instead, as a lawyer might, he writes his conclusions, leaving spaces
where he'd like sources or case law to back up a thesis. On several
occasions where the research has suggested opposite conclusions, his
students say, he has asked them to go back and look for other cases, or
simply to omit the discrepant information. "That's the way it's done; a
piecemeal, ass-backwards way," says one student who has firsthand
experience with the writing habits of Dershowitz and other tenured
colleagues. "They write first, make assertions, and farm out [the work]
to research assistants to vet it. They do very little of the research themselves."
