In the wake of the public disclosure a few weeks ago of a sweeping March 2003 Justice Department memo on interrogation methods, a fierce debate has raged across countless legal blogs about the memo's controversial author, John C. Yoo, who is now a professor at the law school at the University of California at Berkeley, and whether the document is grounds for his removal from the faculty there.
The Yoo memo is perhaps most noteworthy for its very narrow definition of what constitutes torture:
“The victim must experience intense pain or suffering of the kind that is equivalent to the pain that would be associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body functions will likely result...”
Many have argued, including Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, that Yoo's March 2003 memo established the legal underpinning for the sort of abuses that were later revealed to have taken place at Abu Ghraib. The disclosure of the Yoo memo has led to numerous calls for his dismissal from the law school at Berkeley. The New York Times ran a scathing editorial in which they characterized Yoo's employment at Berkeley as inexplicable. (Yoo received tenure at Berkeley in 1999.)
On April 10, Christopher Edley Jr., dean of the law school, released a statement in which he affirmed that "because this is a public university, [Yoo] enjoys not only security of employment and academic freedom, but also First Amendment and Due Process rights."
Philip Carter, an attorney and former Army officer who edits Slate's Convictions blog, argues that Edley "gets it exactly wrong -- and epitomizes why people deride the 'Ivory Tower' as insulated from reality. ... Academic freedom should not be a dodge for personal or professional responsibility."
Brian Leiter, who thinks that "Bush and his gang of war criminals deserve to have their status confirmed by a court of law," nonetheless thinks efforts to oust Yoo from Berkeley are a "disgraceful attack on the academy and tenure."
Henry Farrell, a political scientist at George Washington University who blogs at Crooked Timber, argues that the dispute is not, in the end, an issue of academic freedom because "it doesn’t concern Yoo’s ideas about the laws or communication of same; it concerns credible allegations that Yoo acted directly and deliberately, in his capacity as an employee of the US government to facilitate war crimes." The Yoo case, Farrell writes, is an instance "where traditional academic freedoms don’t and shouldn’t apply."
Brad DeLong, who teaches in the economics department at Berkeley, confessed he was torn about whether a committee should be convened to examine whether Yoo's appointment to the Berkeley faculty should be revoked for moral turpitude.
For more on Yoo's influential and expansive theory of executive power, check out this recent Michael Nelson essay from The Chronicle Review.
And then, from deep in the archives of The Harvard Crimson, there is this 1988 opinion piece by a young John Yoo announcing his support of Michael S. Dukakis for president because, among other reasons, a president Dukakis would execute a humble foreign policy that understands "that America can no longer dictate to the rest of the world."
