Legal News

Back To School: The John Yoo Edition

By Ashby Jones

We’re sure that, for many, the living is good as a faculty member at the UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) (yes that’s what the school likes to be called). After all, you’ve got the great weather, proximity to San Francisco, world-class resources, an intellectually vibrant student body, and an avenue called Ashby. What’s not to love?

But the living is not quite so easy for John Woo, the tenured Berkeley law professor and former Bush administration lawyer who, while in the White House, authored controversial legal memos justifying the use of enhanced interrogation techniques. After a semester down at Chapman’s law school in politically more hospitable Orange County, Calif., Yoo is back in Berkeley. And his first day back up by the Bay, well, made news.

According to this AP story, anti-war activists protested Monday at Berkeley to call for Yoo’s firing. Campus police arrested at least four people who refused to leave the university’s law school building.

Shouting “war criminal,” the protesters confronted Yoo as he entered a lecture hall on the first day of class. The demonstrators said Yoo should be dismissed, disbarred and prosecuted for war crimes for his work as a Bush administration attorney from 2001 to 2003, when he helped craft legal theories for waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques.

Yoo was not available for comment.

Demonstrators staged a mock arrest of Yoo. Some dressed in black hoods and orange prisoner suits similar to ones seen in infamous photos of Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, which was closed in 2006 following reports of detainee abuse.

“There is little doubt that John Yoo is a war criminal,” said civil rights attorney Dan Siegel, speaking outside Boalt Hall. “John Yoo went to Washington and created the ideological, political and legal basis for the torture of innocent people.”

Berkeley’s dean, Christopher Edley, has rejected calls to dismiss Yoo, saying the university doesn’t have the resources to investigate his Justice Department work, which involved classified intelligence.

And Yoo, has defended the controversial interrogation techniques as necessary. “To limit the president’s constitutional power to protect the nation from foreign threats is simply foolhardy,” Yoo wrote in the WSJ last month.

We particularly liked the exchange that appeared at the end of the story. One second-year student, said the university should determine if he violated UC’s faculty code of conduct. “I personally believe he has blood on his hands. But another said he’s a good teacher. “I don’t think it’s the university’s place to fire him for political opinions,” he said.

Whaddya think, LBers? Would you take a course taught by Yoo? Would it make a difference if the course were on a politics-lite subject, like contracts or torts?

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on August 18, 2009 (boomark / email).