Alan Dershowitz on the Dilemma of Preventive Justice

"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. The Japanese were trying to prevent the United States from attacking Japan when they bombed Pearl Harbor. Prevention has become the cover for many, many bad things.

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 7, oh, my God, what a better world we would have.

…We have to make trade-offs all the time, and there's no jurisprudence to that trade off."

How do we balance the urgency of preventing terrible harms with the importance of safeguarding civil liberties?

This is the question posed by Alan Dershowitz’s new book "The Preventive State."

“Prevention has become kind of the cover for everything we do—good and bad—and we don't have the mechanism yet for distinguishing the good from the bad and balancing the inevitable bad that we know we're going to get from some of these things against the hope for a good.”

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