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June 14, 2025 - Epoch Times
06:13
Alan Dershowitz on the Dilemma of Preventive Justice
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Almost everything bad that has ever been done in our world has been done in the name of prevention.
Hitler said he was trying to prevent the spread of Bolshevism.
uh...
the japanese were trying to prevent the united states from attacking japan when they bombed pearl harbor uh...
prevention has become On the other hand, prevention is absolutely crucial.
If we could have prevented 9-11, if we could have prevented Pearl Harbor, if Israel could have prevented October 7th, oh my God, what a better world we would have if we could have prevented the spread of COVID, if we could have prevented so many horrible things that have happened in this world without diminishing the civil liberties and civil rights of people.
It's perfect.
It's perfect.
It's utopia.
But we don't live in utopia.
And we have to make trade-offs all the time.
And there's no jurisprudence.
For that trade-off, we live in the preventive state.
We are moving more and more toward replacing deterrence and reaction with prevention.
Why?
First, the dangers are greater than they've ever been before.
Nuclear proliferation, diseases, terrorism, so many things are horrible.
Yet our ability, through artificial intelligence and other means, to predict and prevent these horrors from occurring is greater than it's ever been.
It's a clash.
It goes back to Benjamin Franklin.
Those who would give up substantial liberties in exchange for a little bit of security deserve neither.
But sometimes you have to give up a little bit of inessential liberty to gain an enormous amount of security.
And that's what the preventive state's all about.
You described the preventative state as a kind of minority report scenario or the rise of it.
And of course, minority report...
The idea that you can predict crime ahead of time and solve it ahead of time, create, again, this perfect, I suppose, utopian vision.
Explain to me why it's actually a minority report scenario that you're describing.
Well, I coined the term preventive state and I taught about it for years before the film Minority Report.
In fact, when Minority Report came out, I showed the film in my class because I was saying these things for years.
People have tried to predict crime from the beginning of history.
I had two colleagues at Harvard, Sheldon and Eleanor Gluck, who had become famous around the world.
For creating a mechanism for predicting criminal behavior by young juveniles based on their activities and attitudes when they were three, five, seven years old, it proved not to be accurate.
Yes, they could predict some people that would commit crimes, but they had many, many what I call false positives.
That is, there were many people they pointed to and said, you're going to be a criminal when you grow up.
And they turned out to be perfectly reasonable people.
In fact, what the Glooks were predicting was activism, was energy.
And for certain people in certain backgrounds, when you're active and energetic, you grew up to be a criminal.
In other backgrounds, you grew up to be a hedge fund guy.
Let me jump in here for a moment.
We're watching these, you know, what appear to be, you know, incredibly violent riots happening in L.A. right now.
There's a lot of debate whether or not it's appropriate to use the military, the National Guard, to deal with them in the context of, I guess, police being limited in terms of what they can do by the people that are governing them.
How do you view this whole scenario?
Obviously, those who advocate the sending in of the federal troops are doing it on preventive grounds, and they're going to say it's self-proving.
They're going to say, see?
As soon as we sent in the troops, there wasn't a lot of rioting and violence.
And the opponents are going to say, see?
There was never any violence.
You shouldn't have sent in the troops.
Nobody will ever know the answer to the question, did the sending in of federal troops prevent or did it exacerbate the situation?
That's the kind of dilemma we face often when we engage in preventive activities that are.
Except that there was quite a bit of violence, and it's kind of documented.
But did it get worse, or did it get better?
That's the question.
But I think the problem is, again, I'm going back to media here, right?
Is that a great number of media minimize that, right?
Look, we don't have media in this country.
We have Pravda on both sides.
So the...
Everything was fine.
There were a few nonviolent protesters.
And then the federal troops came in and it all went bad.
The other side is saying exactly the opposite.
There was horrible violence.
There were breaking of windows.
There were smashing of cars.
There were burning of this and that and the other thing.
And if the troops hadn't come in, it would get worse.
You're going to get the media presenting their narrative.
And tragically, in America, there is no Walter Cronkite.
Walter Cronkite could not get a job today in the American media.
He was too balanced.
He was too fair.
Today, you want to hear what you want to hear on the channel you pick.
You want your news.
You want your narrative.
And so we can't get at the truth through the media.
Well, we're trying our best to fit that role, I have to say.
I think there was more truth to the fact that there was violence.
I mean, we had people on the ground watching what was happening.
I mean, like, considerable.
You see, you know, there's...
So it's not completely both.
I guess I'm worried you're kind of both sides-ing it a little bit too much here.
The question really is not, was there violence?
Of course there was violence.
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