1 Boring Old Man

Christopher Edley, Jr.

Title: William H. Orrick, Jr., Professor of Law and Dean

^{Christopher Edley, Jr. joined Boalt Hall as dean and professor of law in 2004, after 23 years as a professor at Harvard Law School. He earned a law degree and a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard University, where he served as an editor and officer of the Harvard Law Review. Edley’s academic work is primarily in the areas of civil rights and administrative law. He has also taught federalism, budget policy, Defense Department procurement law, national security law, and environmental law. Edley was co-founder of the Harvard Civil Rights Project, a renowned multidisciplinary research and policy think tank focused on issues of racial justice. His publications include Not All Black and White: Affirmative Action, Race and American Values and Administrative Law: Rethinking Judicial Control of Bureaucracy.}

^{Following graduation, Edley joined President Carter’s administration as assistant director of the White House domestic policy staff, where his responsibilities included welfare reform, food stamps, child welfare, disability issues, and social security. He served as national issues director throughout the 1987-88 Dukakis presidential campaign, and then as a senior adviser on economic policy for President Bill Clinton’s transition team in 1992. In the Clinton administration, he worked as associate director for economics and government at the White House Office of Management and Budget from 1993 to 1995. There, he oversaw a staff of 70 civil servants responsible for White House oversight of budget, legislative and management issues in five cabinet departments (Justice, Treasury, Transportation, Housing & Urban Development, Commerce) and a diverse group of over 40 autonomous agencies, including: FEMA, FCC, General Services Administration, SBA, SEC, CFTC, EEOC, the bank regulatory agencies, and the District of Columbia. In 1995 he was also special counsel to the President, directing the White House review of affirmative action. He later served the Clinton White House in 1997 as a consultant to the President’s advisory board on the race initiative.}

^{From 1999-2005, Edley served as a congressional appointee on the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. In 2001, he was a member of the Carter-Ford National Commission on Federal Election Reform. He is currently a trustee of the Russell Sage Foundation and of The Century Foundation. He is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and the American Law Institute. He also serves on the executive committee of the advisory board for the Division on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education of the National Research Council, which is the research arm of the National Academies of Sciences. At UC Berkeley, he is founder and faculty-Co-Director of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity, a multidisciplinary think tank.}

^{In March 2006, Dean Edley was named to a national nonpartisan commission created to conduct an independent review of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. The 12-member Commission on No Child Left Behind issued recommendations in February 2007 for reforming and improving the legislation as Congress considers reauthorizing federal education laws. Co-chaired by former Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson and former Georgia Governor Roy E. Barnes, the commission is funded by several leading educational foundations, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.}

^{In April 2007, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which conducts scholarly activities and interdisciplinary research to advance the public good, elected Dean Edley as one of its new Fellows.}

The Torture Memos and Academic Freedom

Christopher Edley, Jr.
The Honorable William H. Orrick, Jr. Distinguished Chair and Dean
UC Berkeley School of Law

While serving in the Department of Justice, Professor John Yoo wrote memoranda that officials used as the legal basis for policies concerning detention and interrogation techniques in our efforts to combat terrorism….

Assuming one believes as I do that Professor Yoo offered bad ideas and even worse advice during his government service, that judgment alone would not warrant dismissal or even a potentially chilling inquiry. As a legal matter, the test here is the relevant excerpt from the "General University Policy Regarding Academic Appointees"…

Types of unacceptable conduct: … Commission of a criminal act which has led to conviction in a court of law and which clearly demonstrates unfitness to continue as a member of the faculty…

This very restrictive standard is binding on me as dean, but I will put aside that shield and state my independent and personal view of the matter. I believe the crucial questions in view of our university mission are these: Was there clear professional misconduct—that is, some breach of the professional ethics applicable to a government attorney—material to Professor Yoo’s academic position? Did the writing of the memoranda, and his related conduct, violate a criminal or comparable statute?

Absent very substantial evidence on these questions, no university worthy of distinction should even contemplate dismissing a faculty member. That standard has not been met.