Casting himself as a lowly functionary in the administration with less access to the president than an intern, Yoo — now a Berkeley professor who frequently faces protests from students who say he’s responsible for the Bush administration’s torture policies — says he was just following orders.

Of those torture papers, he says: “I had to write them. It was my job. As a lawyer, I had a client. The client needed a legal question answered.”

His parents, he tells Solomon when she asks about his childhood, were both psychiatrists. Not that he’s in denial or anything.

Yoo, of course, is the author of the infamous “torture memos” that justified the abuse and torture of terror suspects held abroad in U.S. custody, and authorized the suspension of the Bill of Rights on U.S. soil.

The Associated Press reports that campus police arrested at least four people who refused to leave the university’s law school building.

Yoo reportedly ignored the demonstrators and. after police removed them from his classroom, began teaching.

Yoo returned to UC Berkeley yesterday after spending the spring semester at Chapman University School of Law in Orange County, where his friend John Eastman is the dean.

According to the AP, Berkeley law students are divided over Yoo: while some think he’s a war criminal who should be fired, his classes are still among the most popular at the law school.

The Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility is expected to release a report any day now analyzing the conduct of Yoo and his colleagues at the Office of Legal Counsel under the Bush administration, and determining whether he violated ethical rules.  The report has been delayed for months while its subjects and the Department of Justice review and amend its contents.

From the report itself, John Yoo’s Office of Legal Counsel memo — and the lightning-fast reporting of Spencer Ackerman, Marc Ambinder and others on Friday — we now know that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, aware that ignoring the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution might come back to bite them later, sought the drafting of a legal opinion that would approve the president’s secret surveillance program and shield them from later attack.

The fact that the White House sought the assistance of Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo in the OLC, though is itself evidence that the White House was trying to get around, rather than comply with, the law.

As I’ve noted before, legal memos justifying an unreasonable or inaccurate legal position don’t necessarily provide a “golden shield” for the executive.

Yoo, after all, was known when he was hired as the Berkeley law professor and staunch Federalist Society member who held theories on executive power that were far outside the legal mainstream. And the memos and academic analyses he then proceeded to write were so extreme and so mischaracterized law and history in an effort to reconcile conservative “originalist” principles with his own aggressive view of an all-powerful president as Commander-in-Chief that they’ve been characterized as an “outrageous theory of presidental dictatorship” by Yale University law professor Jack Balkin and as “simply hooey” by Marty Lederman at Georgetown (now in the Office of Legal Counsel in the Obama administration).

The inspectors general report details how Yoo and the administration ignored parts of the FISA law that conflicted with his theory, for example, and made the outrageous argument that a warrantless search doesn’t violate the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on “unreasonable” searches and seizures because it can’t be “unreasonable” for the president to authorize it in wartime. Why it’s “reasonable” to prevent even secret judicial review of such searches is never explained.

For an academic to hold extreme views of executive power, of course, is arguably a matter of academic freedom, and even a form of creative theorizing that one might admire. (Although some of Yoo’s Berkeley colleagues, such as economist Brad DeLong, among others, have described his theories as reaching so far beyond the bounds of creative academic theorizing as to be simply dishonest and undeserving of that protection.)

But Yoo’s memos at OLC were not part of an academic exercise; they were making policy. Setting aside for a moment the potential culpability of Yoo himself, the more important point here is that, as the inspectors general report makes clear, the White House specifically sought him out and excluded his superiors, ignoring the usual chain of command in the Justice Department, apparently because they knew that John Yoo would give them the legal opinions that they wanted to hear.

That is not the purpose of the Office of Legal Counsel, as Dawn Johnsen, the Obama nominee to head that office has repeatedly made clear, along with more than a dozen other alumni of that office.

As Johnsen wrote in a law review article describing the ten “Guidelines” that should govern the Office of Legal Counsel: “OLC should provide an accurate and honest appraisal of applicable law, even if that advice will constrain the administration’s pursuit of desired policies … In short, OLC must be prepared to say no to the President.”

That the president and vice president apparently chose someone who they knew in advance would not say no to the president is more than an abuse of that legal office; it strongly suggests an intentional and unlawful abuse of executive power.

The latest news accounts that Attorney General Eric Holder is leaning toward appointing an independent prosecutor suggest he may finally be starting to reach the same conclusion.

If, deprived of their context, these statements sound controversial, in the context of her lecture, titled “A Latina Judge’s Voice,” they made perfect sense.

Sotomayor’s view that judges are influenced by their background and experiences is backed up by studies that show that women judges, for example, tend to rule in a way that’s more sympathetic to plaintiffs in employment discrimination cases than male judges do — probably because, having experienced discrimination themselves as they struggled to advance in a male-dominated profession, they’re more attuned to its signs.

A recent study by political scientists and law professors Christina Boyd, Lee Epstein and Andrew Martin, for example, found that “female judges are approximately 10 percent more likely to rule in favor of the party bringing the discrimination claim,” as two of the authors wrote recently in The Washington Post. What’s more, they wrote, “[w]e also found that the presence of a female judge causes male judges to vote differently. When male and female judges serve together to decide a sex discrimination case, the male judges are nearly 15 percent more likely to rule in favor of the party alleging discrimination than when they sit with male judges only.”

Sotomayor, in her 2002 lecture, similarly noted that “The Judicature Journal has at least two excellent studies on how women on the courts of appeal and state supreme courts have tended to vote more often than their male counterpart to uphold women’s claims in sex discrimination cases and criminal defendants’ claims in search and seizure cases.”

“As recognized by legal scholars,” she continued, “whatever the reason, not one woman or person of color in any one position but as a group we will have an effect on the development of the law and on judging.”

While Sotomayor’s comments, taken out of context, provide fodder for her right-wing critics, it’s worth noting that the judge has the evidence on her side.

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Koh, as Spencer has written, is a former Clinton administration State Department official who actually cares about human rights: at Alberto Gonzales’ confirmation hearing to become attorney general in 2005, he testified that the infamous August 2002 Office of Legal Counsel memo authorizing torture was “perhaps the most clearly erroneous legal opinion that I have ever read” and a “stain on our national reputation.” Of course, Jack Goldsmith, the former Bush administration OLC official, has also attacked those opinions as “deeply flawed” and “sloppily reasoned,” so Koh is hardly alone.

But Koh — who is the author or co-author of eight books and more than 150 articles on international human rights, business, national security and international law, among other things — has on occasion also boldly expressed his strong respect for international human rights law, which doesn’t go over very well with many conservatives.

In an article published in the Berkeley Journal of International Law in 2004, for example, which FOX News cites, Koh asked: “What role can transnational legal process play in affecting the behavior of several nations whose disobedience with international law has attracted global attention after September 11th — most prominently, North Korea, Iraq and our own country, the United States of America? For shorthand purposes, I will call these countries ‘the axis of disobedience.’”

Putting the United States in the same axis as North Korea and Iraq has, not surprisingly, outraged critics who, like the Bush administration, don’t believe the U.S. ought to be reined in by international legal standards.

Steven Gross, a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, told FOX News that he worries that Koh “cares as much about — if not more about — international law and integrating that into the American judicial system than he does about protecting American prerogatives and American sovereignty.”

And John Fonte, senior fellow and director of the Center for American Common Culture at the Hudson Institute, said Koh’s views amount to “international imperialism. Under Koh’s plan, the Constitution would become secondary and international law would take precedence regardless of what Americans said about the matter.”

The White House vehemently defended Koh’s nomination on Tuesday, telling FOX News that he is “one of the most respected members of the legal community.”

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I marvel over Dershowitz’s new-found perspective on academic freedom. Can this be the same Alan Dershowitz who launched a massive and successful campaign against Norman Finkelstein to deny him tenure at DePaul University because of his criticism of the Israeli government and of Alan Dershowitz himself? In the Dershowitz perspective, academic freedom apparently shields those whose viewpoints are very close to his own, but not his critics.

Dershowitz was one of the early supporters of the idea that torture might very well be a good idea on people we suspect of terrorism — only, of course, in that theoretical ticking time bomb case, where interrogators somehow know that the person they’re torturing could save us all, if they just torture him brutally enough.

None of this has affected Dershowitz’s tenured position at Harvard — but then, he wasn’t writing memos for the Department of Justice authorizing torture and other techniques of brutality that plainly violated domestic and international law.

For now, Yoo is a “Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law” at the illustrious Chapman University School of Law in Orange County, where his friend, Dean John Eastman, had to issue a public apologia explaining the appointment, saying that even if most scholars think Yoo got the law wrong in his memos authorizing torture, some disagree, or think he “at least made a fair stab at it.”

That’s a pretty low bar to set for a tenured professor at one of the nation’s top law schools. And if the Department of Justice ever issues that internal Office of Professional Responsibility memo that’s still awaiting Attorney General Eric Holder’s approval, Yoo may find himself depending on the kindness of his friends in Orange County for far longer than he anticipated.

A Chinese-American, Chu is a professor of physics and molecular and cell biology at the University of California-Berkeley and has been the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 2004, where he has pushed aggressively for research into alternative energy as a way to combat global warming.

It is the oldest of the Energy Department’s national laboratories, but does only unclassified work and in recent years under Chu has been at the center of research into biofuels and solar technologies. Chu has been a strong advocate for the need to engage scientists in the search for ways to combat global warming by replacing fossil fuels with other energy sources such as biofuels and the sun.

If confirmed, Chu would be the second academic Obama has tapped from UC Berkeley, after Christina D. Romer, an economics professor picked to head Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.

The choice would further confirm that Obama is serious about revolutionizing the nation’s energy policy, and he is willing to look outside of Washington to tap the nation’s top experts in their respective fields.

The strategy is not without risks, as being a good scientist does not necessarily make one a good policymaker. However, Chu’s position as the director of a prominent research laboratory suggests he has experience managing a bureaucracy.

Perhaps most important, the move would close the door on yet another tragic hallmark of the Bush era — in the Obama administration, science will direct America’s energy policy, not vice versa.

Berkeley’s City Council will delve into national policy again next week when it votes whether to demand the United States charge Berkeley resident and former Bush adviser John Yoo with war crimes.

This, of course, will mean nothing. Not a single Justice Department official will be compelled by an affirmative council vote to pursue an indictment of Yoo. Nor will the law school have to do anything. This is a purely impotent measure.

I don’t live in Berkeley — I know all I need to know about it from Jawbreaker songs and back issues of Cometbus — but if I did, I’d probably wonder if the council shouldn’t be trying to improve my trash collection or something instead.

That said, I’m hardly in a position to complain about someone else’s futile criticism. That headline is the closest I’ll ever come to indicting John Yoo for war crimes. So one cheer for you, Berkeley City Council.