Academic Liberty and Free Speech at Boalt Hall

Petition in Defense of Academic Liberty, Free Speech, and Open Discourse at Boalt Hall School of Law


We, the undersigned students and alumni of the Boalt Hall School of Law, put forth this petition to express our concern about the growing threat to academic liberty and free speech at our institution.

In April of this year, interim Dean Robert C. Berring responded to a student complaint that alleged racially insensitive comments had been made by a guest lecturer during a role-play exercise. Dean Berring's solution to this incident was the proposed drafting of a speech code for Boalt faculty, which would outline what language or subjects were permissible, in effect issuing a prior restraint on professors' speech. Still more troubling was Berring's stated plan to resolve the "personnel issues involved;" this comment seems to suggest reprisal against the non-tenured faculty member that had invited the guest lecturer.

More recently, a group of Boalt students has called for Professor John C. Yoo to repudiate a January 2002 memorandum, written while he was a Deputy Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel. In this memorandum, Professor Yoo analyzed the legal status of non-state enemy combatants, namely Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives, and proposed that said combatants were not protected by the Geneva Convention. This group of students has called for Professor Yoo's resignation as a professor of law if he does not repudiate his past findings.

Regardless of the merit or veracity of the above viewpoints, the undersigned are unanimous in the belief that unfettered dialogue should be the paramount concern of any academic institution. The proposed retaliatory measures, if realized, would undo decades of free speech tradition at U.C. Berkeley, which has been a haven for both mass movements and the exposition of unpopular opinions. As such, we fully support the right of those students to engage in protest and to petition, but we reject the imposition of speech codes and retaliatory hiring and retention practices.

The enterprise of law school is a laboratory in which opinions and beliefs are ushered into our great marketplace of ideas. History and public consensus are free to reject any of these espoused views, but such a determination can only come about through free and open discourse.

We therefore make the following resolution:

1) We, the undersigned, reject the May 21st petition which called for Professor Yoo's resignation, and condemn any attempt to implement a new speech code or the enforcement of any preexisting speech code.

2) We, the undersigned, reaffirm our abiding belief in the right of free speech and academic freedom.

3) We, the undersigned, demand that the Boalt Administration reaffirm its commitment to academic liberty and free speech, and formally recognize these rights as inviolable.

We, the undersigned, make this resolution, and do so without expressing approval for any of the viewpoints at issue.