Constitutional Law

Professor Yoo Heads South for Winter

The architect of the Bush administration’s controversial policies on interrogation tactics has headed to warmer, less hostile climes for now. UC Berkeley Law Prof. John Yoo is spending this semester away from the liberal campus where he is tenured, teaching at the recently founded Chapman University School of Law in Orange, Calif.

While working in the Justice Department under President Bush, Yoo achieved notoriety drafting memos that endorsed controversial interrogation tactics in the “war on terror.” Yoo reasoned that such tactics were legally permissible by articulating a narrow definition of “torture” that excluded waterboarding and other techniques. He also argued that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to any engagements with members of Al Qaeda.

Yoo indicates that protests in Berkeley have given him a thick skin. “I certainly don’t get upset about being criticized,” Yoo told the Los Angeles Times. “In Berkeley, if you had three or four people, weird people dressed up in costumes in the same place, that would just be like people in line buying coffee.”

Yoo was invited to spend a semester at Chapman by Dean John C. Eastman, a former colleague from their days clerking for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. While Yoo’s arrival at Chapman has drawn some objections from students and faculty, many are pleased to welcome him. “Since Chapman’s relatively new, we’re just getting our name more out there,” said first-year law student Roxana Amini. “Any publicity’s good publicity.” 

Full post as published by ACS Blog on February 12, 2009 (boomark / email).