Did Shoddy Editing Enable American Torture?
A new analysis in the California Law Review, the student-run publication of the University of California at Berkeley’s law school, argues that flaws in the student editing system in that same journal paved the way for John Yoo to publish a career-launching article in 1996. The article set forth a dubious legal basis for practices like waterboarding, which Yoo later applied to U.S. policy as the Bush administration official chiefly responsible for the infamous “torture memos.”
A critical look at the article by any mainstream historian, though, would have thrown cold water on Yoo’s interpretation of the Constitution, claims Janet Cooper Alexander, a Stanford law professor and a former editor of the California Law Review. But like most such reviews, she explains, the CLR is edited and fact-checked by law students who are not expected to get extra input from established scholars on articles that deal with highly technical areas or detailed historical analysis.