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But Alan Dershowitz works in, and writes about, a realm with which Franz Kafka was all too familiar.

Not that Kafka would have been comfortable in Dershowitz's milieu -- the American legal system, where the 60-year-old Brooklyn native is a celebrated defense attorney, Harvard Law professor and author of 13 books including two novels, "The Advocate's Devil" and the newly released "Just Revenge." But then, Dershowitz isn't comfortable either. And that's the point: Both writers struggle with a bewildering and dehumanizing reality in which justice may be achieved only by a "deliberate leap in the opposite direction," in Kafka's words, or in Dershowitz's, by accepting "the cognitive dissonance" of defending the guilty for the sake of a higher principle.

For example, there's the double murderer on death row whose case Dershowitz is handling right now. "Do I think the world will be a better place if he's free from prison? Well, the world would be a better place if we didn't have the death penalty. So I have to move the level of abstraction from a particular case up to a more general principle.

"People wonder about [why I defended] O.J. Simpson," he adds. "They forget that the day I was called and asked to join the case, he was facing the death penalty."

You might say that Dershowitz, defender of such notorious clients as Simpson, Claus von Bulow, Mike Tyson and Michael Milken, is almost obsessed with such "cognitive dissonance," a rarely discussed or understood requisite for practicing law -- at least defense law. And in his novels, he structures his plot and characters in such a way that the reader cannot fail to see the dilemma.

Just Revenge By Alan M. Dershowitz Fiction Warner Books 352 pages

The case in "Just Revenge" involves an old man, Max Menuchen, a Lithuanian Holocaust survivor who discovers that the man who murdered his entire family, along with the rest of the Jewish population of Vilna, is living outside of Boston only a few miles from Max. The mass murderer, Marcellus Prandus, had never been charged with a crime; he had emigrated to America, married and fathered two sons, and is now a grandfather, a model citizen and a family man.

Prandus, an old man himself, has cancer, and would be dead long before the U.S. government could gather enough evidence to deport him. So Max, who survived the massacre by clawing his way out of a mass grave where he was buried under the corpses of his relatives and neighbors, takes the law into his own hands. He exacts a terrible retribution, for which he is arrested and tried for murder.

At trial, he is defended by an old friend, Abe Ringel -- also the protagonist of "The Advocate's Devil" -- a man who bears a strong biographical and philosophical resemblance to Alan Dershowitz.

"Clearly, Max did it," Dershowitz says. "He caused the death of this man, and did it willingly and knowingly.

"At the beginning of 'Just Revenge' I have a dialogue in which Emma [Abe's daughter] persuades Abe to stop representing guilty people -- only innocent people. And along comes Max! And Max is guilty!" Dershowitz is smiling, clearly delighted by the intractable problem. "And Emma pleads with him, 'You gotta represent Max.' And Abe says, 'Aha! See?'

"My job," he continues, underscoring the point, "is to represent anybody. Sometimes they're innocent, sometimes it's a thug who's guilty. Right now I'm working to save the lives of 13 Iranian Jews who were falsely accused of spying, and I've been spending a lot of time on that. When I define my life that way, there's no conflict between the case and what my philosophy is.

"But a few years ago, I represented a woman who killed her husband. Six shots, and then she reloaded the gun and shot him again -- 12 shots -- and she was claiming it was self-defense. And I took that case, and I lost. But while I was trying that case, women all over the country wrote to me. They loved me. Even though, legally, how do you explain reloading that gun?

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