Alan Dershowitz, Goofball: The professor's progress.

Alan Dershowitz says he doesn't get defensive when people accuse him of going a little overboard in his analysis of the Florida presidential fight. Yes, he accused George W. Bush of staging a "legal coup d'etat" and called secretary of state Katherine Harris a crook. But Dershowitz, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard University, says his statements-made during a seemingly endless succession of television appearances-are part of his role as an educator. "I defend my positions," he says. "My job as a teacher is partly as a public provocateur."

Likewise, Dershowitz says he doesn't get defensive when people accuse him of going a little overboard in support of Bill Clinton throughout the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Yes, he accused Republicans of attempting a "legislative coup d'etat" (there's another coup d'etat). And yes, after Clinton gave his angry speech in August 1998 denouncing independent counsel Kenneth Starr, Dershowitz showed up at the Martha's Vineyard airport to give the president a hug. But that doesn't mean he lost his perspective. "I'm not a Clinton lover," he says. "Check my book Sexual McCarthyism. It includes repeated attacks on Clinton. I criticize his personal behavior. I think I stand for principle." Finally, Dershowitz insists he doesn't get defensive when people accuse him of betraying his calling as one of the nation's leading law professors by joining the O. J. Simpson defense team. Yes, he played along with legal tactics that many experts found outrageous-he even held his tongue when fellow lawyer Johnnie Cochran compared Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler. But he says taking the case was the right thing to do. "My involvement in the Simpson case is a proud moment in my life," Dershowitz explains. "There were very important issues involved. Well before it came up, I had been a big critic of police misconduct in search-and-seizure cases. This case proved my point. I'm very proud of my role."

For all his non-defensiveness, Dershowitz has to defend himself a lot these days. But the issue is bigger than elections and impeachments and O.J. Whatever the specific criticism, what Dershowitz is really fighting is the sense that in the past few years his career has taken a strange and, for some, sad turn. Dershowitz has always been a publicity hound and a self-promoter; there's an old line among reporters that "Alan Dershowitz was unavoidable for comment." But some Dershowitz-watchers-not the ones who see him as the raving lunatic they love to hate on television, but the ones who respect his extraordinary intellect and ability-believe that somewhere along the way he stepped over a line. For all his self-promotion and love of publicity, Dershowitz was at one time more respectable than he is today. The man who was once viewed as a flamboyant but solid civil libertarian has now taken on an almost clownish public persona. What happened?

For most of Dershowitz's critics-and even some of his admirers-the answer begins with two letters: O.J. Even though Dershowitz had defended plenty of lowlifes in the past, many of them-the socialite Claus von Bulow, for example, who was convicted and later acquitted of attempting to kill his wife-might at least conceivably have been innocent. Others were indisputably guilty murderers whom Dershowitz saved not from prison but from the death penalty. But Simpson was something different-a man guilty beyond any reasonable doubt in a hyper-publicized case in which all of America saw the evidence in extraordinary detail. And Dershowitz helped him get off.

The public condemnation after Simpson's acquittal was enough to test even Dershowitz's appetite for controversy. He remembers the day the verdict came in. It was Yom Kippur, and he took his family to synagogue near his home in Boston. "Nobody would talk to me," he recalls. "Nobody would look at me. People were just furious with me." When the service got to the part about coming to terms with one's own sins, he got the distinct feeling that everybody, including the rabbi, was thinking of him. "I was a pariah," he says.

A pariah, yes-but also the center of attention. And for Alan Dershowitz, that was the legacy of the Simpson case. Yes, he had made news in earlier years when he demanded freedom for Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard and when he came to the aid of Soviet dissident Anatoly Sharansky. But neither case-nor any other that Dershowitz had ever been associated with, not even von Bulow-attracted the white-hot attention the Simpson trial did.

Still, notoriety didn't do much good for the professor's reputation, among either the general public or opinion-makers. "I think that was an important turning point," says one Harvard Law alum who has had friendly relations with Dershowitz. "Von Bulow had been so exotic it made Alan more interesting without making him appear to be an ambulance-chaser. But his defense of O.J., and the way he did it on television, seemed to be unprincipled and a caricature of what's wrong with the bar, that they will say anything for money."