Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush - Hardcover

John Yoo is a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law, where he has taught since 1993. From 2001-2003, he served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he worked on issues involving foreign affairs, national security, and the separation of powers. He served as general counsel of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee from 1995-96, where he advised on constitutional issues and judicial nominations.

Professor Yoo received his B.A., summa cum laude, in American history from Harvard University and his J.D. from Yale Law School. He was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago Law School in 2003 and at the Free University of Amsterdam in 1998. In 2006, Professor Yoo held the Distinguished Fulbright Chair in Law at the University of Trento (Italy).

Professor Yoo has published many articles on foreign affairs, national security, and constitutional law. He is the author of The Powers of War and Peace: Foreign Affairs and the Constitution after 9/11 (University of Chicago Press, 2005) and War by Other Means: An Insider's Account of the War on Terror (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006). Crisis and Command completes his trilogy on the controversies provoked by the September 11th attacks of 2001.

In this contentious study, Berkeley law prof and former Justice Department official Yoo reprises the brief for expansive presidential power that made him one of the Bush administration's most controversial aides. He focuses on a handful of presidents—Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and FDR—who, he argues, extended executive authority in novel ways to surmount crises without letting an inherently slow, disorganized, corrupt, and pusillanimous Congress get in the way. In his account, these great presidents started wars without congressional authorization, suspended habeas corpus, detained security risks, secretly wiretapped, remade the economy, and unilaterally interpreted the Constitution. All of this, he insists, comports with the Constitution's grant of broad, ambiguous powers to a unitary executive and, usually, with congressional consensus and public well-being. His analysis culminates in a defense of Bush administration policies on warrantless wiretapping, coercive interrogation, enemy combatants, and Iraq, and a denunciation of Obama's deviations from them. Yoo's chronicle cogently fits in Bush's initiatives with previous presidential arrogations of power. But his tacit premise that the open-ended, ill-defined war on terror compares to previous crises like the Civil War and requires similarly drastic responses will be strongly disputed by civil libertarians. (Jan.)
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