John Yoo

John Yoo is a senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute, and a distinguished visiting professor at the School of Civic Leadership at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also the Emanuel Heller Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley where he supervises the Public Law and Policy Program among other programs at Berkeley Law. Concurrently, he is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Yoo has served in all three branches of government: as an official in the U.S. Department of Justice, where he worked on national security and terrorism issues after the 9/11 attacks; general counsel of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee; and as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and federal appeals Judge Laurence Silberman. He has been also a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, in Japan and South Korea, Israel, and Italy.

He is the author, coauthor, editor, and coeditor of thirteen books on constitutional law, international law, national security, and the Supreme Court including, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Supreme Court (Regnery, 2023) which he coauthored with Robert J. Delahunty; Defender in Chief: Donald Trump's Fight for Presidential Power (All Points Books, 2020); and Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush (Kaplan Publishing, 2010). His commentary is regularly published in the popular press, including in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. The recipient of the Federalist Society’s Paul M. Bator Award, he graduated from Harvard College and Yale Law School.