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[rufojr]

http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i28/28a01201.htm

I cannot believe that they are even considering firing this man because of his stated opinions in another position several years ago. What is wrong with this picture? You are impeding on his freedom of speech and rights to expression. That time frame was a tumultuous era for all American citizens and many of us felt the same way with only one thing in mind, keep our country safe and free from additional terrorist attacks! The people that attacked us were living in our country the whole time they were planning to destroy airplanes, buildings and thousands of lives. Where are we heading when we are talking about convicting someone for expressing their own views and opinions. Get the left out of here!

[tenured_feminist]

Um, you do know that the memos weren't an op ed in the Washington Times, right?

We regulate speech all the time. Nobody's free to say whatever he/she/it wants in all contexts. If you think for two seconds about the implications of total non-regulation of speech, you can probably possibly figure this out on your own.

I personally think that if a person uses his position as a state actor to seek to justify and advocate for behavior that violates both US and international law, this maybe ought to go to this person's qualifications as a freaking law professor.

[helpful]

Link?

[Here's the link:

http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i28/28a01201.htm

the mods.]

[ck_dexter]

I agree with tenured feminist.  Regulation of free speech is not contradictory, since one is free to publicly express the same content as regulated speech in a different context.  So, there are many contexts in which Yoo is free to express his revolting opinions on torture without restraint.  I think the question of context is intention and ability: 1) did he intend to merely express an opinion about torture or did he intend to enable it, 2) if he intended to enable it, did he have the capacity to do so to a significant degree.  I.e., was he really just speaking, or acting, and was the action effective?

I think this is arguably a case of unethical, illegal action, masquerading as speech.

[litcrittr82]

http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i28/28a01201.htm

I cannot believe that they are even considering firing this man because of his stated opinions in another position several years ago. What is wrong with this picture? You are impeding on his freedom of speech and rights to expression. That time frame was a tumultuous era for all American citizens and many of us felt the same way with only one thing in mind, keep our country safe and free from additional terrorist attacks! The people that attacked us were living in our country the whole time they were planning to destroy airplanes, buildings and thousands of lives. Where are we heading when we are talking about convicting someone for expressing their own views and opinions. Get the left out of here!

Yours is a bizarre free speech argument, because you seem to be justifying the unconditional right of free speech ('...expressing their own views and opinions...') by the particular conditions of that speech ('...a tumultuous era for all American citizens...').  So what if we applied the same argument to the *current* political climate, one in which there is tremendous pressure on the US to rectify its abuses of power and international law in Gitmo, etc.?  Couldn't we justifiably take correctional and potentially disproportionate actions against those, like the law prof., who may have had a hand in ratifying torture and extremism after 9/11, even without formally 'trying' them for their alleged misdeeds? 

I actually agree with you in broader principle: we shouldn't revoke tenure for faculty who (until convicted of a crime) haven't done more than instantiate what they believe in (as the rest of us do on a daily basis, only perhaps to a lesser effect!).  But your post shows exactly how conservative free speech activists shoot themselves in the foot almost every time: instead of arguing for the unconditional value of free speech, you parade out this poor excuse, this cheap, conditional justification, predicated on a set of circumstances which could easily shift such that they would ruin your whole argument. 

By the way, is there no connection between free speech and, say, habeas corpus?  How can you defend free speech and torture/illegal detention in the same breath?

 

[helpful]

We should look at this in parallel with other cases in other violations of human rights that are justified by legal scholars.

[juanb]

Having read the article, this doesn't seem primarily to be about "free speech" but rather claims about professional competence and/or ethics.  No one is arguing that Woo didn't have the right to say what he said in the Torture Memos.  Rather some are arguing that what he wrote amounted to "shoddy" legal work (and that should be grounds for his dismissal), while others are claiming that he is ethically suspect for manipulating the law in order to give the prior administration what it wanted.

Now, obviously there are also political dimensions to this; people who don't like the "torture memo" policies would like to see Woo removed.  

[tenured_feminist]

We should look at this in parallel with other cases in other violations of human rights that are justified by legal scholars.

Let's all keep in mind that Yoo was not a simple legal scholar when he wrote these memos. If he'd published them in a law review, fine. I might publish a response and call him all sorts of bad names, but that's enough.

To try to create a better parallel, think of it this way. What would you all want to do with someone who was a lawyer for Pinochet's administration? Should that person be able to slide back comfortably into a tenured position at one of Argentina's top law schools? What would you want to do if you were that person's colleague?

[helpful]

Chime to tenured feminist. I was also thinking of those who justified the Rwandan genocide, or the Holocaust. It's all a matter of degree, but the principle of the matter is what is important.

PS Would add that there were lawyers who justified the Dirty War in Argentina as well.

[tenured_feminist]

Chime to tenured feminist. I was also thinking of those who justified the Rwandan genocide, or the Holocaust. It's all a matter of degree, but the principle of the matter is what is important.

PS Would add that there were lawyers who justified the Dirty War in Argentina as well.

All excellent parallels.

[t_r_b]

As usual I agree with TF. But I also have to comment on this, from the article:

"After September 11 we were in uncharted territory," Mr. Eastman says. "Not since 1803, with the Barbary pirates, had we been in a war against a non-nation state."

Off the top of my head: Philippines insurgency; the Viet Cong; Lebanon (early 1980s); Somalia (1990s); Native American resistance from Tecumseh to Crazy Horse.

[doctor_torrseal]

Professors who are also certified in one of the professional fields have to satisfy certain competence and ethics requirements.  Lawyers, doctors, engineers (who have a professional engineer certification), accountants (those who have a CPA) ...  If you violate those requirements badly enough, you can lose your certification - being disbarred, losing the right to practice.  After that happened, a university would essentially have to act, I think.

Now it is unlikely that a disbarment action against John Yoo would succeed.  You practically have to steal clients' money to get disbarred, and torture is a subject on which people disagree, although I personally think anyone who condones his opinions has lost their moral bearings.  My point is that a university is indeed allowed to evaluate its faculty on their conduct as members of their profession.

We also should draw a distinction between a faculty member's right to any opinion and the subset of opinions a faculty member should teach (it's okay with me if a scientist believes that the moon is made of cheese or that evolution is false, but not if he or she teaches that to freshmen).  However, I don't know what John Yoo teaches currently, and that doesn't appear to be at stake here.

[sibyl]

To try to create a better parallel, think of it this way. What would you all want to do with someone who was a lawyer for Pinochet's administration? Should that person be able to slide back comfortably into a tenured position at one of Argentina's top law schools? What would you want to do if you were that person's colleague?

If that person had violated any Argentine or international laws, I would want that person tried by the appropriate court.  But I don't see what this person's employment status would have to do with it.  People have to make a living somehow.  And you can't punish everyone who ever worked for Pinochet, because a lot of people did.

(Frankly, having read about Mr. Yoo's government actions in Barton Gellman's spellbinding book Angler, I am relieved to have him working for a law school rather than a government.)

I side with this fellow:

"A lot of people, myself included, think that the memos represent serious failings of legal ethics, or possibly complicity in crime," says David J. Luban, a law professor at Georgetown University. "But academic tenure shouldn't depend on what people like me think. I think his tenure should be safe unless some impartial official body outside the university makes an independent finding that the memos are professional or criminal misconduct. "

I don't agree with this fellow:

Mr. DeLong urged the university to consider possible discipline. Academic freedom, he wrote, should not shield "those whose work is not the grueling labor of the scholar and the scientist but instead hackwork that is crafted to be convenient and pleasing to their political master of the day."

Who's to say what is "hackwork" and what is "grueling labor"?  A lot of legitimate academic work can look like hackwork to some eyes.  If academic freedom, or for that matter any civil liberty or legal protection, means anything it has to protect everyone.

[daurousseau]

Whatever the disposition of the law professor, what needs to confronted is the mind-set of many Americans revealed in the OP. Americans became hysterical over an act of political terrorism that was run-of-the-mill except for its scope and dramatic impact. The same World Trade Center was terror-bombed in the 1990s and nobody lost any sleep over it in flyover land. Nor was there ever reason for concern in 2001. The target was plainly not "America," but what Ike used to call the military-industrial complex. If America, its people, or its culture had been targeted, the terrorists would have bombed the Disney World.

Our hysteria gave the Bush administration carte blanche to trash as much of the Bill of Rights as they could in 8 years. Congress, including all the liberals, was complicit.

Our fellow citizens have finally shaken off that bad dream and are beginning to come to their senses. One hopes that the law professor will join Cheney as pariahs.

[ck_dexter]

The same World Trade Center was terror-bombed in the 1990s and nobody lost any sleep over it in flyover land.

To be fair to those, like me, who inhabit flyover land:  Middle America began losing sleep due to a highly orchestrated scare campaign centered in the media and government.  The figureheads were not paranoid middle American know-nothings, but neo-conservative elites educated at Yale and the University of Chicago, on the one hand, and collaborating eastern seaboard millionaire "mainstream" news pundits, networks, and papers, on the other. 

Who's to say what is "hackwork" and what is "grueling labor"?  A lot of legitimate academic work can look like hackwork to some eyes.

That errors in judgment are possible doesn't in any way demonstrate that judgment shouldn't be made.  Saying what is and isn't hackwork is what academics do for a living. It's what we do when we recommend or do not recommend someone for a degree, or for a job, or for publication, or for tenure.  It's what we do in our research and what we do in our teaching.  It's our job.

If academic freedom, or for that matter any civil liberty or legal protection, means anything it has to protect everyone.

I agree completely: academic freedom should be measured and enforced equally for all academics.  But this argument is question-begging.  The argument is about whether or not this is a violation of academic freedom.  A number of people have argued that this is a judgment about his professional competence, and thus not a violation of academic freedom.  I've argued that this is a restriction of his  actions as a government collaborator, not of his right to express opinions, and thus not a violation of his academic freedom of speech.