Recently, on April 9th, the National Lawyers' Guild issued a press release calling on the University of California-Berkeley School of Law to dismiss John Yoo. They didn't pull any punches:
Congress should repeal the provision of the Military Commissions Act that would give Yoo immunity from prosecution for torture committed from September 11, 2001 to December 30, 2005. John Yoo should be disbarred and he should not be retained as a professor of law at one of the country's premier law schools. John Yoo should be dismissed from Boalt Hall and tried as a war criminal.
link
And how did Berkeley respond? Find out below the fold:
John Yoo is a full professor of law at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law. In addition to the scholarly articles listed on his bio at the school's web site and his Paul M. Bator Award for excellence in legal scholarship and teaching from the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy, John Yoo is also the author of memos in his role as deputy assistant attorney general of the U.S. Department of Justice from 2001-2003.
John Yoo's most famous memo so far, penned March 14, 2003, advanced the novel legal argument that the President's inherent authority to wage war as Commander in Chief trumped any constitutional or other legal concerns about treatment of enemy combatants. This memo was widely construed as providing the legal cover necessary to authorize "enhanced interrogations", which Amnesty International has called torture.
In response to mounting calls for Yoo's dismissal from the National Lawyer's Guild and individuals, the dean of California-Berkeley School of Law, Christopher Edley, penned a memo of his own (hat tip to TPMMuckraker, where I first read about this):
Because this is a public university, he enjoys not only security of employment and academic freedom, but also First Amendment and Due Process rights.
Lucky thing for him he's not at Guantanamo Bay, I mean er, and now we go to the crux of Dean Edley's legal gymnastics argument:
Yes, it does matter that Yoo was an adviser, but President Bush and his national security appointees were the deciders.
Or in other words, Dean Edley is suggesting that the word "adviser" is the antonym of decider and that there is a legal firewall between individuals acting in these two capacities.
This very restrictive standard is binding on me as dean, but I will put aside that shield and state my independent and personal view of the matter. I believe the crucial questions in view of our university mission are these: Was there clear professional misconduct—that is, some breach of the professional ethics applicable to a government attorney—material to Professor Yoo’s academic position? Did the writing of the memoranda, and his related conduct, violate a criminal or comparable statute?
Somebody please send the Dean a DVD of Taxi to the Dark Side.
Absent very substantial evidence on these questions, no university worthy of distinction should even contemplate dismissing a faculty member. That standard has not been met.
I'm not a lawyer and thus can't offer an opinion on the novelty or practicality of Dean Edley's analysis of Yoo's analysis. But I have heard of a legal doctrine called "conspiracy."
"A criminal conspiracy is nothing more than an agreement to accomplish some common criminal objective, or to work together for a common criminal purpose...As long as at least one overt act is done by a member of the criminal conspiracy, then all of the members of the conspiracy are considered to have committed the crime."
(from a randomly selected lawyer's web site)
So here's my meta-analysis: if a total legal amateur can spent less than five minutes on the web to find evidence that suggests John Yoo is guilty of much more than just the professional sin of having "offered bad ideas and even worse advice", and if professional lawyers are demanding that he be disbarred and tried as a war criminal, just what the hell kind of law school is Dean Edley running over there?
To me, it doesn't sound too different to the one Monica Goodling graduated from, you know the one where John Ashcroft co-teaches a course on "Human Rights, Civil Liberties, and National Security". Regent, last time I checked, has a tier four ranking from US News & World report, which is "the lowest score and essentially a tie for 136th place" (source).
After reading about Ashcroft's last stand on NSA surveillance while he was hospitalized, versus the needless pain, suffering, and death that, as far as my non-legal mind can tell, were a direct result of the enhanced interrogation procedures that Yoo legitimized, I'd nominate Berkeley's law school as the new leading contender for last place law school, at least as long as John Yoo continues to enjoy tenure teach there. Again, in the words of the National Lawyers' Guild: "John Yoo should be dismissed from Boalt Hall and tried as a war criminal."
Why isn't this happening?
Contact Information:
Berkeley's School of Law
American Bar Association
President of the University of California
Regents of the University of California