I bet an indictment would make this guy really happy. Then he could stop writing letters and forwarding op-eds to Dean Ortiz, Louise Epstein, Dean Edley, Professor Jonathan Simon, and a number of other Boalt faculty and admins as part of his to campaign to "drive John Yoo from the Faculty at Boalt Hall." He writes:
...I would embarrassed to be in the same company as Mr. Yoo, and would work to encourage him to leave Boalt Hall faculty voluntarily. I believe his continued presence on campus and as a member of the faculty is a stain on the University’s reputation, and suggests that students who take his classes will be ill-prepared to meet their duties as lawyers.
Do you think John Yoo will be indicted for war crimes? Do you think he should be kicked off the faculty if he is? Do you think he should be kicked off the faculty anyway?
8 comments:
yes. yes. yes.
lol, wishful thinking....
No, no, and no.
Look, I'm a liberal guy, and I despise torture. But unless I'm missing something here, this is nuts.
Remember those memos we all wrote during our first semester? We were *not* asked to make moral arguments. Instead, we were charged with the task of crafting an objective legal analysis pertaining to a given issue.
If attorneys were indicted for making unpopular appraisals of the state of the law, THAT would be the stuff "of some authoritarian regime and has no place in the ... United States."
I think some of the conclusions in the memo are awful. What to do? Criticize the leaders who made the decisions. Criticize the law that arguably makes it possible.
I admit I haven't been following this stuff too closely, but wouldn't the proposed charges come from an international court? According to the WaPo article, Yoo's memo stated: "Our previous opinions make clear that customary international law is not federal law and that the president is free to override it at his discretion..." So while his legal justifications may have been sound under US law, they may have been violating international law.
There's also the possibility that his legal analysis was not sound. We all know that the law can be twisted to say anything, and there is such a thing as dishonest legal analysis. It would not be ethical for any of us to go to court and misrepresent the law to the judge.
Take International Law and you learn the first day that it's not "law" insofar as there is no enforcement mechanism to make sure individual countries obey it. And that one of the U.S. government's favorite things to do is try to hold others accountable to international law while openly flouting it.
10:06 here.
Yeah, I definitely admit potential for dishonest legal analysis. I don't trust a NYT editorial writer to be able to spot it, though. ;)
Anyone want to wade through the memo and give us an opinion?
I posted some thoughts for Brendan here: http://brendancalling.com/2008/04/04/letters-to-yoos-colleagues/#comment-11643
*yawn*
need some amphetamines, 10:25?
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