Lying Law Professors.

Ann Althouse is on a roll today:

[C]ollege applications aren't the best place to demonstrate your ideas in your own way. It's tough for people whose core value is honesty even when it's against your interest. All but the weirdest liars tell the truth when it is in their interest.

 It's one thing to game the college applications by lying about your identity...

You don't have to check the box. But it is sad to face a situation in which you have a strong personal interest in not disclosing a heritage you may want to proudly display.

But think about what lying accomplishes in science research ... or criminal justice.  Eventually, you are unmasked by your lies, and you take a lot of others down with you.

What I mean is that the most truth-based individuals are the ones who feel the need to tell the truth when it's not in their interest. Limiting truth-telling to situations where the truth serves your interest puts you in the company of all the dishonest people (except the weirdest ones).

And those weird ones should get some credit for their interest-neutral devotion to lying. It's an awesome love of lying if you lie even when it would be in your interest to tell the truth. 

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Speaking of:
“I never ask a client whether he did it or not,” Mr. Dershowitz once told Charlie Rose. “I don’t want the client to feel that he has to start his relationship with me by lying.”
 
It appears the late, great Alan Dershowitz is still struggling to defend himself against... lies, lies I tell you!  He defended OJ Simpson, and admitted child rapist Jeffrey Epstein, but now his own reputation is on the line...

Last December, as part of a filing in an ongoing lawsuit, a woman charged that Mr. Dershowitz had sex with her when she was underage. Mr. Dershowitz called the claim an “outrageous lie” and over the last year has faced fallout from the accusation.

“This is very serious,” Mr. Dershowitz said last month at his apartment in Manhattan. “It involves my life, my legacy, my career, my history, my reputation.”

...

Mr. Epstein called him in 2006 to ask for help because he was being investigated in connection with sex crimes.

“I said, ‘Look, you know Jeffrey, we’re acquaintances, maybe that’s not such a great idea,” Mr. Dershowitz said. “He said, ‘No, no, no, I really need you to do this.’”

The case, Mr. Dershowitz realized, “was right in my wheelhouse.”

In December 2005, a few months before he got that phone call, Mr. Dershowitz, his wife, children and grandchildren were vacationing at Mr. Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion.

The friendship between the men started in the mid-1990s on Martha’s Vineyard. Not long after they met, Mr. Epstein invited Mr. Dershowitz to a birthday party for Mr. Wexner. Instead of accepting presents, the retail magnate had a tradition of asking friends to bring the most interesting person they had met over the last year.

“He said, ‘I’d like to bring you,’” Mr. Dershowitz said.

...

Soon after meeting Mr. Epstein, Mr. Dershowitz became drawn into his rarefied world. Mr. Epstein was an enigmatic figure living in an Upper East Side mansion once owned by Mr. Wexner, who had reportedly been his mentor. A college dropout who once worked for Bear Stearns, Mr. Epstein said he handled investments for billionaires, though other than Mr. Wexner, he declined to identify them.

Along with prominent businessmen, Mr. Epstein’s friends included scientists, socialites and celebrities. He donated $30 million to finance scientific research at Harvard. President Bill Clinton and the actor Kevin Spacey flew aboard his private jet to Africa to discuss AIDS policy.

Mr. Dershowitz also traveled on Mr. Epstein’s plane and was invited to join his chats with Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister. The men grew so close that Mr. Dershowitz solicited Mr. Epstein’s feedback as he was writing books.

In the interview in his Manhattan apartment, Mr. Dershowitz said Mr. Epstein was often surrounded by young women, but none struck him as underage. “I never got involved in his social life,” he said.

...

After taking the case, Mr. Dershowitz responded, as was his way, with hardball tactics. He gathered information from the girls’ postings on social media accounts, which he claimed showed they were drug users or had lied to Mr. Epstein about their age. He also helped put together a defense team that included Roy Black, the prominent trial lawyer, and Kenneth W. Starr, who led the investigation into President Bill Clinton’s involvement with Monica Lewinsky.

...

Over time, authorities found evidence suggesting that Mr. Epstein had paid dozens of girls for sexual services. However, Mr. Dershowitz and other lawyers struck a deal in which Mr. Epstein agreed to plead guilty in a Florida court to one count of soliciting prostitution and another of procuring a person under 18 for prostitution. At the same time, federal officials agreed not to bring charges against Mr. Epstein or any of his potential co-conspirators.

A Florida judge sentenced Mr. Epstein to 18 months in jail, though he was allowed to spend days working on the outside. He was released in 2009 after serving 13 months — a shortened sentence for good behavior — and had to register as a sex offender.

...

Then, in 2011, a British newspaper, The Mail on Sunday, published an article about Virginia Roberts Giuffre, another of Mr. Epstein’s accusers, who was then living in Australia. Ms. Giuffre, now a 32-year-old mother of three, told the newspaper that Mr. Epstein first started paying her for sexual services when she was 15. She also described traveling around the world on Mr. Epstein’s jet.

 

“Basically, I was training to be a prostitute for him and his friends who shared his interest in young girls,” Ms. Giuffre told the newspaper.

...

[L]ast December, Mr. Dershowitz was drawn into the Justice Department lawsuit in an entirely different way. In a motion filed that month, Ms. Giuffre claimed that she and Mr. Dershowitz had sex when she was a minor aboard Mr. Epstein’s plane and at the money manager’s homes in New York, New Mexico and the Virgin Islands. 

She also asserted that Mr. Epstein had “sexually trafficked” her to other powerful friends 

...

Mr. Dershowitz says he wants nothing more than for Ms. Giuffre to publicly retract her claims. He insists that (her attorney) Mr. David Boies privately told him that he believed Mr. Dershowitz was innocent and that Ms. Giuffre, while believing the allegations, was mistaken or confused.

Mr. Boies says Mr. Dershowitz’s claims are ludicrous. “I never said to him that I concluded that my clients’ assertions were incorrect,” he said. “I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything like that.”

...

In this intensifying game of legal chicken, it is not clear who will flinch first. Ms. Giuffre seems unwilling to yield and used a recent court filing to fire back at Mr. Dershowitz.

“He is lying by denying that he had sex with me,” said Ms. Giuffre...

Mr. Dershowitz says he is no longer friendly with Mr. Epstein, who lives once again in his lavish Upper East side mansion.  

...

For a man who has never lacked for self-confidence, Mr. Dershowitz now finds himself saddled with regret. Two clients, he said, have backed away from him because of his accuser’s claims, and he worries...

He now says he thinks that he should have said no when Mr. Epstein called.

“I think I do regret having taken the case in light of everything that has happened since,” he said. “If I could give back the money I made in this case and have this episode of my life erased, I’d do it.”

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For the record?
I don't think he's lying about that last one...  but I don't think his money can undo now what's been done.  Poor liar, tripped up by his own omnipotence.  The truth hurts.

Too bad his mother didn't teach him better.