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Academic

: Essentially Contested America

Protesting Yoo's Views on Torture

By Robert Justin Lipkin

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Law students at the University of California-Berkeley protested at Saturday's graduation against Professor John Yoo's presence of the law faculty. "Some 50 protesters, clad in orange jumpsuits and black hoods to emulate the infamous photos of prisoners in Iraq, picketed UC Berkeley's law school yoo:

graduation ceremony Saturday, demanding that the university fire Professor John Yoo for his authorship of the Bush administration's policies on torture. . . . 'We want to see him fired and disbarred for being a war criminal,' said Anne Weills, an Oakland attorney who said she was with the National Lawyers Guild, one of the groups that protested. 'Academic freedom stops when you intend to harm or injure somebody.' . . . Yoo, a tenured constitutional law professor at Boalt Hall, took a leave of absence from 2001 to 2003 to work for the U.S. Department of Justice. During that time, he wrote what critics call the "torture memos," which protesters say outlined the legal basis for the use of torture at the Abu Ghraib (Iraq) and Guantanamo Bay (Cuba) military prisons." Continue reading here
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While the students have a right to protest, professor Yoo has a right to his opinion also. Casting this controversy in terms of the students' free speech and John Yoo's academic freedom, both of which are inviolable, treats this controversy superficially. The more salient question is whether the students' contention that Yoo is a war criminal for his part in justifying the administration's torture policy has any currency. Moreover, although Yoo claims he is not "fazed" by these protests, that's too bad. Yoo's analysis of the legitimacy of torture and his view regarding the inherent powers of the presidency depart from both traditional conservative and liberal views on these subjects. Consequently, one wonders whether Yoo, in his solitude, ever tries to appreciate why his views repel so many different kinds of thoughtful people.

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Full post as published by Essentially Contested America on May 19, 2008 (boomark / email).