Down By Law

...one of the best ways to understand John Yoo's advocacy for waterboarding not being torture is not simply through a political lens, but also as someone who was an academic and not a real lawyer. Academics don't get exposed to what law really is: the exercise of imperative force by the state against a private person, or by a corporation or private person against another. Contracts or rules of procedure are not simply ideas. They are ways to get things from others, or to have things taken from you. These actions help and hurt real people, sometimes very deeply. Yoo's torture opinion is absurdly academic hair-splitting, reaching conclusions that are not only wrong as a matter of law, but which ignore willfully the fact that real people are on the receiving end of Yoo's tortured logic: the recipients of waterboarding, and to a lesser extent, the equally real people whose lives and values are compromised by being directed to inflict it. Lawyers understand these realities better than academics, because they have that "practical" thing the academy so abhors.

see WHAT'S WRONG WITH LAW SCHOOL? A LOT.