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Groomed by the Right: John Yoo is the creature of a powerful and wealthy right-wing legal organization, the Federalist Society . Founded in the early 1980s, the Federalist Society is now the ticket to fame, fortune and political influence for right-wing lawyers.
Yoo's career shows its enormous influence. According to the Wall Street Journal (9/12/2005), Yoo joined in 1989 while in law school. "With help from Federalists, he snared prestigious clerkships: first with Judge Laurence Silberman, an appellate jurist in Washington much admired on the right, and then with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. A good word from the justice, Mr. Yoo says, helped him obtain a top staff job with Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. While on Sen. Hatch's staff, Mr. Yoo clashed with Democrats over Clinton judicial nominees. In 2000, he aided the Republican legal contingent that helped win the decisive electoral brawl in Florida."
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"Original Intent" and the Law: Like Scalia and Thomas, Yoo belongs to the "original intent" school of constitutional interpretation. They believe not only that the Constitution should be interpreted according to the intentions of its authors but that they can divine what those intentions were. As noted by the Wall Street Journal (9/12/2005), "even by the standards of elite Washington legal circles, Mr. Yoo earned a reputation for what Justice Thomas calls 'a very high level of confidence in conclusions he might reach'... Mr. Yoo had an unusual degree of certainty that he knew the 'original intent' of the Constitution's authors, Justice Thomas says. 'We'd kid him sometimes that he was right there at the founding.'"
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"Original Intent" and the Yoo Doctrine: Yoo uses the original intent doctrine to argue that the Consitution's founding fathers intended the President to have vast, inherent powers as commander-in-chief, justifying the Bush Administration's handling of prisoners at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and use of torture and assassination as weapons in the war against terrorism.
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Bio:Professor of Law, Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California at Berkeley, 1993-present
Visiting Scholar, American Enterprise Institute, 2003-present
Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel, Department of Justice (under John Ashcroft, 2001-2003
General Counsel, Senate Judiciary Committee (under Orrin Hatch, 1995-1996
Law Clerk, Supreme Court (under Clarence Thomas), 1994-1995
Law Clerk, U.S. Court of Appeals, Washington, DC (under Laurence Silberman, controversial right-wing judge, veteran of Nixon and Reagan administrations), 1992-1993
J.D., Yale Law School, 1992
A.B., Harvard College, summa cum laude, American History, 1989
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http://zfacts.com/p/103.html | 01/18/12 07:25 GMT
Modified: Tue, 18 Apr 2006 03:16:04 GMT
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