Torture Lawyer Flees Berkeley Amid Protests

It can be hard to be a professor: publish or perish, sit on committees…dodge protesters? Just ask John Yoo, author of the memos that laid out and justified the harsh interrogation tactics used by the Bush administration. Yoo, a Berkeley law professor, has taken leave from his left-leaning professional home, where his presence is regularly protested, for the calmer Chapman University in Orange County, the LA Times reports.

Berkeley protests against Yoo included a billboard and a city council resolution branding him a war criminal. Yoo responds, “I would feel I wasn’t doing my job as an academic if I wasn’t writing or saying things that other people disagreed with.” Despite some small protests, Chapman seems mainly intrigued by Yoo’s celebrity. Says one student, “Any publicity's good publicity.”
(More John Yoo stories.)