By Howard Fischer
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PHOENIX — Famed constitutional attorney Alan Dershowitz will have to pay a share of the sanctions imposed on the lawyers who brought what a trial judge called a frivolous lawsuit on behalf of failed candidates Kari Lake and Mark Finchem.

U.S. District Court Judge John Tuchi ruled Friday that the retired Harvard Law School professor did play a role in the case, even to the point of signing the pleadings. And that signature, the judge said, was tantamount to saying that their claims had legal merit.

But Tuchi accepted Dershowitz’s claim that his role in the case was limited. So the judge said he will have to pay just 10% of the $122,200 in fees run up by Maricopa County defending the legality of the use of machines to tabulate ballots.

And the balance will be borne by the other two attorneys hired by the pair in their unsuccessful bid to require hand counting.

Dershowitz, however, was not satisfied.

“I’m going to appeal this all the way up to the Supreme Court,” he told Capitol Media Services. “I will not accept any ruling that says I owe a single penny.”

And he claimed the ruling, unless overturned, threatens to undermine the role of legal experts like himself who serve merely as legal consultants in lawsuits and don’t take a position in the underlying case.

Friday’s order was the one remaining issue before Tuchi after he threw out the claims by Lake and Finchem, unsuccessful Republican contenders for governor and secretary of state, that tabulators can produce inaccurate results. The judge ruled last year that assertion was little more than speculation, backed only by “vague” allegations about electronic voting systems generally.

“Plaintiffs fail to produce any evidence that a full hand count would be more accurate,” Tuchi wrote in his original ruling. And the judge also pointed to existing requirements for both pre- and post-election audits to ensure the machines that tally the paper ballots report accurate results.

Having determined the filing was frivolous, Tuchi said last year that the pair’s attorneys — but not the failed candidates themselves — are jointly responsible for paying the legal fees incurred by Maricopa County in defending the lawsuit.

What was left is the amount — and how much of that Dershowitz should pay.

Dershowitz argued he should be entirely excused, saying he wrote only one paragraph of the legal pleading. And that, he said, dealt not with the claims by Lake and Finchem that machines are inherently unreliable but on a narrow legal question.

“I helped to develop the following argument: When a private company is hired by the government to perform a quintessential government function such as vote counting, it cannot refuse to provide relevant information about the workings of its machines on the grounds of business secrets,” he told the judge.

And none of that, Dershowitz said, related to arguments by the pair’s other attorneys that machine counting of ballots should be forbidden.

“I had absolutely no duty to investigate the rest of the allegations because I had nothing to do with them,” he said. “I didn’t vouch for them. I had nothing to do with them.”

And Dershowitz specifically sought to put some distance between himself and Lake in particular.

“I’ve never met Lake,” he told Capitol Media Services. “I would not have voted for her. I’m a Democrat.”

Some of the questions of his legal — and financial — culpability turns on the narrow legal issue that Dershowitz, in at least his initial filings in this case, listed himself as “of counsel” to the plaintiffs. That’s a legal phrase that generally means someone hired by a law firm to do work for it, versus actually representing a client.

That distinction left the judge unimpressed.

“An attorney’s signature is tantamount to a warranty that the complaint is well grounded in fact and existing law (or proposes a good faith extension of the law) and that it is not filed for an improper purpose,” the judge said.

“Whether Mr. Dershowitz signed, or intended to sign, those filings as ‘counsel,’ or ‘attorney’ or ‘of counsel,’ he signed them,” Tuchi wrote. He said that wasn’t necessary, saying that lawyers can contribute to cases without actually signing the pleadings.

“And he effectively conceded that he authorized his signature on these filings without investigating whether they were legally and factually sound,” the judge said.

Tuchi also pointed out Dershowitz took a larger role than simply crafting one paragraph.

The judge said he participated in at least one telephonic conference with Maricopa County lawyers. And then there’s the fact that Dershowitz, who is not licensed to practice law in Arizona, specifically applied for — and obtained — permission from the court to appear and participate in the case.

Still, Tuchi said it would be wrong to hold him liable for paying his full share of the cost.

He said Dershowitz claims “with some credibility” to have committed nothing more than an “honest mistake.”

“Further, any monetary sanctions imposed should not be so significant as to dissuade other legal experts from providing advice or assistance in litigation out of fear of sanctions,” the judge said.

But the judge said it also would be wrong to let Dershowitz escape any penalty at all.

“Attorneys must be reminded that their duties are not qualified in the way he suggests and that courts are entitled to rely on their signatures as certifications their filings are well-founded,” Tuchi said.

Dershowitz, for his part, told Capitol Media Services that forcing him, as a legal consultant, to pay financial sanctions for his consulting role would upset a personal precedent that goes back more than half a century.

“I started doing it in 1970, signing myself ‘of counsel,’” he said. “That’s what lawyers ought to do when they have a limited role.”

Despite Tuchi’s ruling throwing out the case — and his latest on legal fees — the dispute is not over.

Lake and Finchem are asking the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn the judge’s decision.