Dear Boalt Hall School of Law Alumni Center:
I don’t know what difficulty you are evidently having with my previous letters to you. They are written in english which, as the constitutional scholar and United States Senator Sam Ervin once said, is my native tongue.
You send me various invitations, mostly to give money which any self-respecting Boalt alumnus is expected to have oodles of, and I have patiently explained several times that, one, I am the grad who didn’t make all that money and, two, if I had a gazillion dollars I would write checks to pretty much everyone in the universe before I’d hand you a dime.
I have explained why that is.
The Boalt faculty harbors a man who in any just society would be behind bars for war crimes and abetting numerous felonies. I’m sure John Yoo, Satan’s little helper, would disagree.
It was John Yoo who gave legal cover to the Bush policies on torture, who authored legal opinions based on sophistry and infamously informed America that the President had the inherent legal authority to crush the testicles of a child in front of his mother if he believed that to do so would thereby extract useful information.
I don’t know what you folks are teaching these days, but I have a notion of to whom you are teaching it. When I attended Boalt, a professor who espoused as reputable policy this kind of human behavior as a right of the state, would’ve been run out of his job by an enraged student body. It is a very sad fact that today’s Boalt students seem uninterested in the most basic tenets of a free society.
Do not tell me about freedom of speech. People who endorse torture of children, and any who argue that it may lawfully be done, are accessories before the fact to the crimes to which they attempt to extend a fig leaf of legitimacy.
Yes, Boalt Hall has a great and storied history. Its graduates include many worthy and prominent people. I do not believe that its faculty ought to reflect one point of view. But fascism and its enablers are off the charts, or ought to be. And until that happens at Boalt, its reputation is being shamed.
