john yoo understood better than most that even a frivolous constitutional argument is all the permission the right needs to pursue its autocratic ambitions and the legal establishment still hasn't come up with a good response
just finished gary wills’ “Bomb Power” and the chapters on the dubya administration are a good reminder of a) the horror show of those years and b) the remarkable fact that in an administration of degenerates, john yoo stands apart as the absolute worst
i mean there's lots of good responses, but they're just not palatable to the legal and political establishment. throwing the lot of them in jail would've been a good start!
but michael very serious people say if we hold people accountable for licensing war crimes lawyers will be afraid to represent low-level drug offenders
Edley or Chemerinsky?
It is shameful Yoo’s still on faculty (I’m a Berkeley Law alum). Brad Delong @delong.bsky.social and other professors tried to get the Academic Senate to remove him, but the Senate didn’t formally take it up.
The US state made a conscious decision that fascism was not a threat after WW2 and chose not to take action against it. Such lost opportunity.
Men like this should not just have 'become controversial'.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_...
John Yoo’s torture memo accomplishes the incredible feat of claiming that you can avoid liability for a crime against humanity by intentionally separating the actus reus and mens rea across two separate actors with a straight face
Is there a legal remedy for what is essentially a guy using his left hand to talk to the right hand and then agreeing with himself? I mean there are legal remedies we aren't pursuing like impeaching judges for bribery or other more mechanical means like packing the court.
I suppose, but that's not technically a legal question because the president has no immunity, legally. The DOJ refused to prosecute Trump while in office due to an internal memo, not any law forbidding them from pressing charges.
It is a disgrace that Yoo is employed as a law professor. At fucking Berkeley, of all places!
His authorship of the torture memo should have disqualified him from a professorship anyplace with pretensions to intellectual integrity.
In canada it's the same deal. The right found out it doesn't need a good excuse, it just needs an excuse. By the time the left and the media are done talking about it, other boundries have already been crossed. Old rules about decorum can be trumped by speed and shameless lies.
To me the scary thing about Yoo's argument is how logical it can sound. He posits that respect to interrogation there is a space between torture at one end of the spectrum and Constitutionally protected rights like the 4th and 5th amendments way down near the other end of the spectrum. (1/ )
If you buy into that premise, "all" that he is saying is that there is an area between reading someone the Miranda warning and torture as defined by treaties and international law and we can do whatever the F we want in their. It's couched as a "if it doesn't say you can't then you can" (2/ )
type of an argument. The problem of course is that then that gets turned into the interrogator getting to decide if what they are doing is torture or not. Which, ahhh, kind of defeats the whole purpose of laws against torture. (3/3)
Yeah. It also flips the law on its head expressly to violate it. Broadly written laws are meant to apply broadly; this approach pretends that broadness is license to anything not specified. It's like arguing you didn't "murder" someone cuz you stabbed them and the statute doesnt mention knives.
We have failed to learn what every troll on the Net knows - mockery has power. The legal profession needs to remember ridiculous arguments do not deserve to be respected. And those who make them do not respect the law and deserve nothing but ridicule in turn.
Certsinly not Ivy professorships.
I'm not one to wish violence upon another human being but he's one guy that, if I knew there would be no repercussions, would gladly take five minutes in a room alone with him and no cameras. Just saying.
the right IS the legal establishment, or at least they set its agenda to a significant degree. "Law and Economics" was just blatantly a conservative legal movement from the start, now standard in legal ed, and the bias for conservatives in clerking is no secret.
