John Choon Yoo
Title: Faculty Director, Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law
John Yoo received his B.A., summa cum laude, in American history from Harvard University. Between college and law school, he worked as a newspaper reporter in Washington, D.C. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was an articles editor of the Yale Law Journal. He then clerked for Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals of the D.C. Circuit.
Professor Yoo joined the Boalt faculty in 1993, then clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court. He served as general counsel of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee from 1995-96. From 2001 to 2003, he served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice, where he worked on issues involving foreign affairs, national security and the separation of powers.
Professor Yoo has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago and the Free University of Amsterdam, and he held the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Law at the University of Trento, Italy in 2006. He has received research fellowships from the University of California, Berkeley, the Olin Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Professor Yoo also has received the Paul M. Bator Award for excellence in legal scholarship and teaching from the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy. He has testified before the judiciary committees of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, and has advised the State of California on constitutional issues.
He is the author of The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11 (University of Chicago Press, 2005), War by Other Means: An Insider's Account of the War on Terror (Grove/Atlantic 2006), and Crisis and Command: The History of Executive Power From George Washington to George W. Bush (Kaplan 2010).