The Sacrificial Yoo: Accounting for Torture in the OPR Report

When the Justice Department finally released the report of its Office of Professional Responsibility on the “torture memos,” recommending that the initial torture memo’s authors, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, be referred for bar discipline, John Yoo declared victory in op-eds in the Wall Street Journal and Philadelphia Inquirer. The report itself concluded that Yoo and Bybee had acted unethically, and quoted many of Yoo’s successors in office as condemning the memos as, among other things “slovenly,” “riddled with error,” and “insane.” But Yoo claimed victory because Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis vetoed its recommendation that he be referred for discipline; he, too, condemned Yoo, but considered it more a matter of poor judgment than unethical behavior. This essay critically reviews the OPR Report and Margolis’s report, and maintains that both the report and Margolis committed two fundamental errors. First, neither considered the ultimate illegality of what the memos authorized – torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of human beings within United States custody and control. They focused merely on method, not end result; but of course, it is the end result that makes what Yoo and Bybee did so unethical. Second, and relatedly, both reports spared Yoo and Bybee’s successors from the analysis afforded to Yoo and Bybee. Yoo and Bybee’s successors were very quick to condemn the initial report, but what is perhaps most damning about the entire story is that these same successors consistently reached the same bottom line as Yoo and Bybee, and authorized the same criminal behavior. In many ways, the actions of Yoo and Bybee’s successors are more deeply disturbing, moreover, as they persisted in giving a green light to the CIA in secret even as the law in public grew ever explicit in underscoring that what they were authorizing was illegal. Moreover, these later memos, written by Jack Goldsmith, Daniel Levin, and Steven Bradbury – all of whom harshly criticized Yoo’s work after the fact – were drafted not in the heat of the moment, but many years after 9/11, after seeing the public condemnation of the initial Yoo-Bybee memo, and after the CIA’s Inspector General had reported that there was no evidence that the CIA’s “enhanced” interrogation tactics were obtaining evidence not obtainable through noncoercive tactics. The OPR and Margolis were unwilling to address the ultimate legal wrong committed by Yoo and Bybee, I argue, precisely doing so would necessarily have implicated too many in the Justice Department (and beyond). Thus, the focus on John Yoo was a convenient ploy to avoid confronting the full extent of systemic illegality perpetrated by a whole series of Justice Department lawyers and high-level officials in the Bush administration, up to and including President Bush himself, over a six-year period

Laughing at Treaties

This article responds to two articles by Professor John Yoo appearing in the same volume. Professor Yoo maintains that treaties, either categorically or presumptively, have the same status in the United States as in the United Kingdom, where they lack the force of domestic law, and hence are not judicially enforceable, until implemented by statute. This response argues that Yoo\u27s thesis contradicts the text of the Constitution, which declares treaties to be the \u27law of the land.\u27 The response notes, further, that Professor Yoo\u27s reliance on the ratification debates to read the Supremacy Clause\u27s reference to treaties out of the Constitution rests on an undefended and implausible version of originalism which regards as binding a supposed agreement reached by Federalists and Anti-Federalists at certain ratifying conventions to read the Constitution in a way that conflicts with the text. The response goes on to explain that, in any event, Yoo\u27s thesis cannot be squared with longstanding precedent, and that Yoo\u27s claim that his thesis is supported by the Constitution\u27s structural commitments is question-begging and unpersuasive

Telegram from Seok-Hyun Yoo, Advisor to the President of the Korean Democratic Justice Party, to Geraldine Ferraro

Telegram from Seok-Hyun Yoo, advisor to the president of the Korean Democratic Justice Party, to Geraldine Ferraro. Telegram has handwritten notes.https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/vice_presidential_campaign_correspondence_1984_international/1070/thumbnail.jp

Faithful Translation Applied in Translating Webtoon I Love Yoo

The aim of translation is to transfer meaning from the source language to the target language. There are some methods that can be used in translating the text, one of them is faithful translation. Faithful translation method is a method that reproduces the exact contextual meaning of the original within the limits of the grammatical structures of the target language. This study focuses on analyzing faithful translation methods in the webtoon “I Love Yoo”. The objective of this study is to identify how the faithful translation method is applied in translating webtoon Ï Love Yoo”. The method applied in this study is qualitative descriptive method and the data were taken from the 1st to 10th episode of webtoon “I Love Yoo”. The data collected were analyzed by reading both versions of the webcomic, classified each sentence according to the translation methods and explained why the sentences are included into each translation method. To analyze the data, this study used the theory translation method proposed by Newmark (1988). It is found that 8 translation methods were applied but faithful translation method is most frequently used because the translator translates cultural terms and maintains the degree of grammatical and lexical faithfully to the intentions and the text-realisation of the source language writer.

Katie Jihye Yoo

Duman ChoHakjun YoonUnyoung NaWonjoo LeeNino RotaLibby LarsenHans Ga

Charging up a mountain of debt: households and their credit cards.

I use the Surveys of Consumer Finances conducted in 1983, 1989 and 1992 to separate the growth of credit card debt into two categories, changes in the number of households with credit cards and changes in households credit card debt. I can then account for the relative contributions of increases in credit card availability, number of households, and average credit card debt. I also use the household income information to quantify the impact of more lower income households with credit cards. Data suggest that the increases in credit card debt is largely attributable to increased average credit card debt of households, not from more households with access to credit cards. Moreover, households in the top half of the income distribution accounted for most of the changes in the growth of credit card debt although lower income households increased their access to credit cards at a faster rate than households in general, and increased their average debt faster than the population.Debt ; Credit cards

Legal Archetypes and Metadata Collection

In discussions of state surveillance, the values of privacy and security are often set against one another, and people often ask whether privacy is more important than national security.2 I will argue that in one sense privacy is more important than national security. Just what more important means is its own question, though, so I will be more precise. I will argue that national security rationales cannot by themselves justify some kinds of encroachments on individual privacy (including some kinds that the United States has conducted). Specifically, I turn my attention to a recent, well publicized, and recently amended statute (section 215 of the USA Patriot Act3), a surveillance program based on that statute (the National Security Agency’s bulk metadata collection program), and a recent change to that statute that addresses some of the public controversy surrounding the surveillance program (the USA Freedom Act).4 That process (a statute enabling surveillance, a program abiding by that statute, a public controversy, and a change in the law) looks like a paradigm case of law working as it should; but I am not so sure. While the program was plausibly legal, I will argue that it was morally and legally unjustifiable. Specifically, I will argue that the interpretations of section 215 that supported the program violate what Jeremy Waldron calls “legal archetypes,”5 and that changes to the law illustrate one of the central features of legal archetypes and violation of legal archetypes. The paper proceeds as follows: I begin in Part 1 by setting out what I call the “basic argument” in favor of surveillance programs. This is strictly a moral argument about the conditions under which surveillance in the service of national security can be justified. In Part 2, I turn to section 215 and the bulk metadata surveillance program based on that section. I will argue that the program was plausibly legal, though based on an aggressive, envelope-pushing interpretation of the statute. I conclude Part 2 by describing the USA Freedom Act, which amends section 215 in important ways. In Part 3, I change tack. Rather than offering an argument for the conditions under which surveillance is justified (as in Part 1), I use the discussion of the legal interpretations underlying the metadata program to describe a key ambiguity in the basic argument, and to explain a distinct concern in the program. Specifically that it undermines a legal archetype. Moreover, while the USA Freedom Act does not violate legal archetypes, and hence meets a condition for justifiability, it helps illustrate why the bulk metadata program did violate archetypes