What The Torture Prof Teaches

What the Torture Prof Teaches
by Paul Campos | Daily Beast

After authorizing torture for the Bush administration, John Yoo has returned to Berkeley Law School without any apparent professional repercussions. Paul Campos on what Yoo's students can learn from him.

...First, if you’re a person of high social status and have good enough political connections, nothing will happen to you even if you commit the most serious crimes....Second, the legal profession’s system of self-regulation is largely dedicated to protecting lawyers at almost any cost rather than protecting the public from the consequences of incompetent or immoral lawyering....Third, legal argument is a sufficiently flexible tool that, under the right circumstances, it’s possible to argue successfully that torture isn’t torture, that laws which explicitly make no exceptions for exceptional circumstances actually do make exceptions for exceptional circumstances, that in time of war America is essentially a dictatorship, and that we are always at war. Read more.

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