LCIL Friday Lecture: 'Let's Talk About the Boteros: Law, Memory and the Torture Memos at Berkeley Law' by Prof Laurel Fletcher

LCIL International Law Seminar Series

Lecture summary: What parts of their uncomfortable histories should universities remember, and how? Recent debates have erupted at institutions of higher learning over their ties to early benefactors who held views antithetical to the values that today’s leading schools espouse. These controversies stir public “memory work” through which learning communities negotiate their relationship to the past. At Berkeley Law, several paintings from Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib series controversially adorn a central corridor, reminding viewers of law’s failure to protect against torture in the US War on Terror. The canvasses also serve as a normative rebuke to the Torture Memos which created a new legal framework for interrogation of suspected terrorists after 9/11, and to John Yoo, the Berkeley Law faculty member who wrote them. I argue that the paintings are a form of public memory, a site of communicative interplay between viewers, the paintings, and the debates about the school’s association with Yoo. Understanding the Boteros as public memory places the paintings and the controversy surrounding them into a larger conversation about the responsibility of law schools and educational institutions to inculcate values of respect for human dignity and freedom and to prepare graduates to serve and safeguard these same principles.