Torture and Tenure at Berkeley

By EVAN R. GOLDSTEIN

The release a few weeks ago of a memorandum on torture written by John C. Yoo in 2003 has prompted calls for his dismissal from the University of California at Berkeley. In the 81-page memo, Yoo — a tenured professor of law at Berkeley and at the time a senior official in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel — offered a detailed opinion on the legal strictures governing U.S. military interrogations of detainees. The memo advocated a narrow definition of