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American attorney and former government official (born 1967)
the American legal scholar

John Choon Yoo (유준; born July 10, 1967) is a South Korean born American legal scholar and former government official who serves as the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. Yoo became known for his legal opinions concerning executive power, warrantless wiretapping, and the Geneva Conventions while serving in the George W. Bush administration, during which he was the author of the controversial "Torture Memos" in the War on Terror. As the deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) of the Department of Justice, Yoo wrote the Torture Memos to determine the legal limits for the torture of detainees following the September 11 attacks. The legal guidance on interrogation authored by Yoo and his successors in the OLC were rescinded by President Barack Obama in 2009. Some individuals and groups called for the investigation and prosecution of Yoo under various anti torture and anti war crimes statutes. A report by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility stated that Yoo's justification of waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation methods" constituted "intentional professional misconduct" and recommended that Yoo be referred to his state bar association for possible disciplinary proceedings. Senior Justice Department lawyer David Margolis overruled the report in 2010, saying that Yoo and Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee—who authorized the memos—had exercised "poor judgment" but that the department lacked a clear standard to conclude misconduct. He attended high school at Episcopal Academy, graduating in 1985. He graduated in 1989 with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, with membership in Phi Beta Kappa. He then attended Yale Law School, where he was a member of the Yale Law Journal, graduating with a J. D. in 1992.

After law school, Yoo was a law clerk for Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1992 to 1993 and for Justice Clarence Thomas of the U. S. Supreme Court from 1994 to 1995. He served as general counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee from 1995 to 1996.

Yoo has been a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law since 1993, where he is the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law. He has written multiple books on presidential power and the war on terrorism, and many articles in scholarly journals and newspapers. He has held the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Law at the University of Trento and has been a visiting law professor at the Free University of Amsterdam, the University of Chicago, and Chapman University School of Law. Since 2003, Yoo has also been a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington. He wrote a monthly column, "Closing Arguments", for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Yoo has been principally associated with his work from 2001 to 2003 in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) under Attorney General John Ashcroft during the George W. Bush Administration. Yoo's expansive view of presidential power led to a close relationship with Vice President Dick Cheney's office.

In what was originally known as the Bybee memo, Yoo asserted that executive authority during wartime allows waterboarding and other forms of torture, which were euphemistically referred to as "enhanced interrogation techniques" were issued to the CIA. Yoo's memos narrowly defined torture and American habeas corpus obligations. Yoo argued in his legal opinion that the president was not bound by the American War Crimes Act of 1996. Yoo's legal opinions were not shared by everyone within the Bush Administration. Secretary of State Colin Powell strongly opposed what he saw as an invalidation of the Geneva Conventions, while U. S. Navy general counsel Alberto Mora campaigned internally against what he saw as the "catastrophically poor legal reasoning" and dangerous extremism of Yoo's opinions. In December 2003, Yoo's memo on permissible interrogation techniques was repudiated as legally unsound by the OLC, then under the direction of Jack Goldsmith. On March 14, 2003, Yoo wrote a legal opinion memo in response to the General Counsel of the Department of Defense, in which he concluded that torture not allowed by federal law could be used by interrogators in overseas areas. Yoo cited an 1873 Supreme Court ruling, on the Modoc Indian Prisoners, where the Supreme Court had ruled that Modoc Indians were not lawful combatants, so they could be shot, on sight, to justify his assertion that individuals apprehended in Afghanistan could be tortured. he was called to testify before the House Judiciary Committee in 2008 in defense of his role. The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) began investigating Yoo's work in 2004 and in July 2009 completed a report that was sharply critical of his legal justification for waterboarding and other interrogation techniques. The OPR report cites testimony Yoo gave to Justice Department investigators in which he claims that the "president's war making authority was so broad that he had the constitutional power to order a village to be 'massacred.'" The OPR report concluded that Yoo had "committed 'intentional professional misconduct' when he advised the CIA it could proceed with waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques against Al Qaeda suspects," although the recommendation that he be referred to his state bar association for possible disciplinary proceedings was overruled by David Margolis, another senior Justice department lawyer.

Yoo provided a legal opinion backing the Bush Administration's warrantless wiretapping program. That interpretation is used to assert that the normal mandatory requirement of a warrant, under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, could be ignored. He claimed that critics of the program misunderstand the separation of powers between the President and Congress in wartime because of a failure to understand the differences between war and crime, and a difficulty in understanding the new challenges presented by a networked, dynamic enemy such as Al Qaeda. "Because the United States is at war with Al Qaeda, the President possesses the constitutional authority as Commander in Chief to engage in warrantless surveillance of enemy activity."

In December 2020, President Donald Trump appointed Yoo to a four year term on the National Board for Education Sciences, which advises the Department of Education on scientific research and investments.

Yoo suggested that since the primary task of the President during a time of war is protecting U. S. citizens, the President has inherent authority to subordinate independent government agencies, and plenary power to use force abroad. Yoo contends that the Congressional check on Presidential war making power comes from its power of the purse. He says that the President, and not the Congress or courts, has sole authority to interpret international treaties such as the Geneva Conventions, "because treaty interpretation is a key feature of the conduct of foreign affairs". His positions on executive power are controversial because the theory can be interpreted as holding that the President's war powers afford him executive privileges which exceed the bounds which other scholars associate with the President's war powers. His positions on the unitary executive are controversial as well because they are seen as an excuse to advance a conservative deregulatory agenda; the unitary executive theory says that every president is able to roll back any regulation passed by previous presidents, and it came to prominence in the Reagan administration as a "legal strategy that could enable the administration to gain control of the independent regulatory agencies that were seen as impeding the agenda of deregulating business." Following his tenure as an appointee of the George W. Bush administration, Yoo criticized certain views on the separation of powers doctrine as allegedly being historically inaccurate and problematic for the global war on terrorism. For instance, he wrote, "We are used to a peacetime system in which Congress enacts the laws, the president enforces them, and the courts interpret them. In wartime, the gravity shifts to the executive branch." In 1998 Yoo criticized what he characterized as an imperial use of executive power by the Clinton administration. In an opinion piece in the WSJ, he argued that the Clinton administration misused the privilege to protect the personal, rather than official, activities of the President, such as in the Monica Lewinsky affair. In 2000 Yoo strongly criticized what he viewed as the Clinton administration's use of powers of what he termed the "Imperial Presidency". He said it undermined "democratic accountability and respect for the law". Yet, Yoo has defended President Clinton, for his decision to use force abroad without congressional authorization. He wrote in The Wall Street Journal on March 15, 1999, that Clinton's decision to attack Serbia was constitutional. He then criticized Democrats in Congress for not suing Clinton as they had sued presidents Bush and Reagan to stop the use of force abroad.

In 2019, on Fox News, Yoo made the comment "Some might call that espionage" when discussing Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council. Vindman was set to testify in front of Congress the next day about Trump requesting that the Ukrainian president start an investigation into his political rival Joe Biden. Yoo subsequently said "I really regret the choice of words" and that he had been referring to Ukrainian officials rather than Vindman. In 2020, Yoo praised Trump as a "constitutional conservative". He wrote a 2020 book about Trump titled Defender in Chief: Donald Trump's Fight for Presidential Power. During an interview on C SPAN in August 2020, Yoo defended the use of enhanced executive privilege within the Trump administration. He stated in a concurrent interview on CBS with Ted Koppel that his support for Trump may be guided by his possible reading of PEADs (Presidential Emergency Action Documents) as further supplementing his support for enhanced executive privilege during wartime and other national emergencies. After Trump lost his bid for re election in the 2020 United States presidential election, Yoo stated in an opinion piece that the Supreme Court could decide the outcome of the election. Weeks later, Yoo and J. Michael Luttig advised Mike Pence that the Vice President had no constitutional authority to interfere with the certification of Electoral College votes on January 6, 2021, as had been proposed to Pence by Trump attorney John Eastman.

Yoo's writings and areas of interest have fallen into three broad areas: American foreign relations; the Constitution's separation of powers and federalism; and international law. In foreign relations, Yoo has argued that the original understanding of the Constitution gives the President the authority to use armed force abroad without congressional authorization, subject to Congress's power of the purse; that treaties do not generally have domestic legal force without implementing legislation; and that courts are functionally ill suited to intervene in foreign policy disputes between the President and Congress. With the separation of powers, Yoo has argued that each branch of government has the authority to interpret the Constitution for itself. In international law, Yoo has written that the rules governing the use of force must be understood to allow nations to engage in armed intervention to end humanitarian disasters, rebuild failed states, and stop terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Yoo's academic work includes his analysis of the history of judicial review in the U. S. Constitution. Yoo's book, The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11, was praised in an Op Ed in The Washington Times, written by Nicholas J. Xenakis, an assistant editor at The National Interest. It was quoted by Senator Joe Biden during the Senate hearings for then U. S. Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, as Biden "pressed Alito to denounce John Yoo's controversial defense of presidential initiative in taking the nation to war". Yoo is known as an opponent of the Chemical Weapons Convention. During 2012 and 2014, Yoo published two books with Oxford University Press. Taming Globalization was co authored with Julian Ku in 2012, and Point of Attack was published under his single authorship in 2014. His 2017 book Striking Power: How Cyber, Robots, and Space Weapons Change the Rules for War is co authored with by Jeremy Rabkin. Yoo's latest book, Defender in Chief: Donald Trump's Fight for Presidential Power, was published in July 2020.

In Vice, a 2018 biographical comedy drama film about Dick Cheney, Yoo is portrayed by Paul Yoo. In The Report, a 2019 film about the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture, Yoo is portrayed by Pun Bandhu.

Yoo is married to Elsa Arnett, the daughter of journalist Peter Arnett.