Berkeley Law (Boalt Hall): June 2008 Archives

A Call for an Inquiry into the Ideological and Legal Origins of the Torture Doctrine

By David A. Sylvester, April 11, 2006

Today we are here to challenge Professor Christopher Edley, Jr, dean of Boalt Hall at the UC-Berkeley School of Law, as a former civil rights attorney, as well as the rest of the law faculty at Boalt Hall to respond to a national emergency. That national emergency is that their profession - the academic legal profession and the universities that have trained them - has produced an ideology that claims to justify what used to be considered crimes of totalitarian governments, namely arbitrary detention, torture, trials before military commissions without any civil due process, not just as emergency measures required during a state of war but as legally based on the United States Constitution.

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Circuit judge accused of pro-torture bias 

 by Josh Richman

Wednesday, February 13th, 2008

I was at Cal's School of Law this morning to cover arguments to a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel in the federal civil rights lawsuit brought against San Francisco and its police department in the "fajitagate" case. Sitting on this three-judge panel was Circuit Judge Jay S. Bybee, an Oakland native who maintains his chambers in Las Vegas.

As John Roemer reported in Monday's edition of the Daily Journal legal newspaper, attorney Dennis Cunningham, representing plaintiff Jade Santoro, filed a motion last Thursday asking Bybee to recuse himself on the basis of an August 1, 2002 memo he signed while serving as the assistant attorney general in charge of the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel...

Cunningham's motion argued Bybee shouldn't hear Wednesday's case involving police officers with a history of excessive-force accusations because "unnecessary, and gratuitous, and so often sadistic, uses of force" are among "domestic forms of torture."