John Yoo is a Korean-born American legal scholar and former government official who serves as the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the UC Berkeley School of Law. He joined the faculty in 1993. Professor 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.

Professor Yoo has clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals of the D.C. Circuit. 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 under the George W. Bush Administration where he worked on issues involving foreign affairs, national security and the separation of powers. 

He became known in the early 2000s for his legal opinions concerning executive power, warrantless wiretapping, and the Geneva Conventions. Yoo was the author of the controversial Torture Memos, which set to determine the legal limits for the torture of detainees during the War on Terror.

His latest book The Politically Incorrect Guide to The Supreme Court will be available for purchase at the August 24th dinner. In this book, he lays out why justices must defend the Constitution, how the Supreme Court became central to American politics, and how the Court can either save the Republic or jeopardize the entire legislative process.

Professor Yoo is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.  

His tenth book, Defender-in-Chief: Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power, was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2020. Professor Yoo’s other books include Striking Power: How Cyber, Robots, and Space Weapons Change the Rules for War, Point of Attack: Preventive War, International Law, and Global Welfare, and Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George Bush.