Christopher Edley - Advisory Board - Obama-Biden Transition Project

Edley is the Dean of the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, a position he has held since 2004. Previously, he spent 23 years as a professor at Harvard Law School, where his students included the president-elect.

Edley has had a long career in government service, starting in the Carter administration as assistant director of the White House domestic policy staff. During the Clinton Administration, he was associate director for economics and government at the White House Office of Management and Budget, 1993-1995, and, in 1995, served as special counsel to the president. From 1999 through 2005, he was a congressional appointee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

In addition to serving as an advisor to the Obama campaign, Edley was the national issues director for the 1988 presidential campaign of former Gov. Michael Dukakis (D-Mass.) and served as an economic advisor to former President Clinton's transition team.

Edley has been mentioned as a possible Supreme Court or Justice Department appointment. One question sure to come up in a possible confirmation hearing, however, is his rejection of calls to dismiss Boalt law professor John Yoo, the author of controversial Justice Department "torture" memos. Edley, responding on Boalt's Web site to Yoo's critics, wrote that while "Professor Yoo offered bad ideas and even worse advice during his government service, that judgment alone would not warrant dismissal or even a potentially chilling inquiry," and argued that Yoo's First Amendment freedoms necessitated protecting his tenure, or "academic freedoms would be meaningless."

In 2001 and 2002, Edley was paid $400,000 to lobby on behalf of the Coalition for Asbestos Resolution, a front group funded largely by GAF Corp to lobby for a bill that would have reduced certain businesses' asbestos liability.