Kenneth Anderson is professor of law at Washington College of Law, American University; a visiting fellow of the Hoover Institution and member of its Task Force on National Security and Law; and a non-resident senior fellow of the Brookings Institution. He writes on international law, the laws of war, and national security, and his most recent book is "Living with the UN: American Responsibilities and International Order." Full bio »
Laurie Blank, professor at Emory Law School and director of its International Humanitarian Law Clinic, gives Lawfare the last in the series of guest comments on Mark Mazzetti’s New York Times Magazine article, “The Drone Zone.” Although the initial hook … Read more »
We will have two final posts in our discussion sparked by Mark Mazzetti’s New York Times Magazine article, The Drone Zone. This one by Michael Lewis, a former Navy fighter pilot and now professor at Ohio Northern State University Pettit … Read more »
Continuing the discussion surrounding issues of personal risk and combat in relation to drone warfare (Anderson on Mazzetti, Corn, and Rona, we add this comment from Charles Dunlap, professor at Duke University Law School and a … Read more »
Gabor Rona, international legal director of Human Rights First and esteemed commenter on several Lawfare posts, sends us this further comment on the Lawfare discussion around Mark Mazzett’s New York Times Magazine piece from last weekend, The Drone Zone. (Ken … Read more »
Geoffrey Corn, professor of law at South Texas College of Law and former JAG officer and chief of the law of war branch of the international law division of the US Army, sends in the following comment on Ken Anderson’s … Read more »
Mark Mazzetti is a fine reporter at the New York Times and I follow his work closely on the front pages, but reading his new piece in the Sunday New York Times Magazine this week, “The Drone Zone,” it … Read more »
This month of July sees negotiations at the UN in New York on a proposed arms trade treaty. Duncan Hollis at Opinio Juris has an excellent introduction with many links. Also at OJ, I offer some thoughts on a … Read more »
Over at Volokh Conspiracy, I make some comments on the NYT article to which Ben linked this morning. My comments run to the kind of signals that the administration might be seeking to send about the thoroughness of its vetting … Read more »
George Washington University Law School’s Laura A. Dickinson’s book from Yale University Press (2012), Outsourcing War & Peace: Preserving Public Values in a World of Privatized Foreign Affairs, is quite possibly the most important work on private contracting in … Read more »
Lawfare’s own Alan Rozenshtein has just published a short Note in the most recent Harvard Law Review explaining and critically discussing controversies surrounding the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and President Obama’s signing statement containing Constitutional objections to parts of … Read more »
Announcing the inaugural paper of the Lawfare Research Paper Series
William C. Marra & Sonia K. McNeil, Understanding “The Loop”: Autonomy, System Decision-Making, and the Next Generation of War Machines, Lawfare Research Paper Series 1-2012 (May 1, 2012), available … Read more »
Lawfare is pleased to announce that it is beginning publication of occasional papers, under title of the Lawfare Research Paper Series. Papers published in this series are ones that the Lawfare editors regard as particularly valuable and important, and will … Read more »
In the next few days, the Naval War College will be devoting a workshop to the topic of the legal geography of the battlefield. That includes the question of whether there is one, separate from where the targetable fighters in … Read more »
The predominance today of “international criminal law” within public international law has meant a corresponding demotion of other areas of PIL – the law of international organizations, for example. But arguably the most important consequence of the fascination of the … Read more »
We’re pleased to note that our new essay, Law and Ethics for Robot Soldiers, has been posted to SSRN. The essay’s fundamental point is that lethal autonomous weapons systems – the “robot soldiers” of our title – are going … Read more »
Several readers have made the good suggestion of creating a list of the “formal” or even (arguably, meaning in the opinion of the Readings Editor) “canonical” statements of the Obama administration regarding: national security and counterterrorism generally, use of force, … Read more »
We now have a collection of speeches from the past two years by the Obama administration’s top lawyers in the national security agencies and departments on targeted killing and (hypothetically speaking) drone programs – DOS, DOD, DOJ, and most recently, … Read more »
The rise of new technologies such as drones, enabling more discrete surveillance and uses of force, is one factor prompting new interest in covert action (used in a colloquial sense). The renewed interest in covert action has also prompted attention … Read more »
Congratulations to the Harvard National Security Journal for a fruitful conference yesterday on the covert action and the law. It was an intensive seminar all day long on the domestic and international law issues surrounding all things covert, and special … Read more »
My confreres at Opinio Juris tell me that Harold Koh, Legal Adviser to the State Department, has given OJ the text of his address on Syria at the on-going annual meetings of the American Society of International Law (ASIL) with … Read more »
John Rizzo, formerly acting General Counsel to the CIA (and now a visiting fellow of the Hoover Institution, where he is working on a memoir) has a short piece on the practicalities of the reporting regime by the CIA to … Read more »
Comparing the role of the Supreme Court in the health care debate and the national security debate, Orin Kerr writes at Volokh Conspiracy:
If the Court does end up striking down the mandate, this will be the second consecutive
The election that matters … Carl Schmitt for County Supervisor. (You can also read a bit about Schmitt and arguments around the meaning of his work for national security here in Benjamin Kleinerman’s Lawfare book review of The Executive Unbound… Read more »
Jhesus-Maria, King of England, and you, Duke of Bedford, who call yourself regent of the Kingdom of France, you, Guillaume de la Poule, count of Suffort, Jean, sire of Talbot, and you, Thomas, sire of Scales, who call yourselves lieutenants
Peter Margulies, professor at Roger Williams University school of law and FOL (“Friend of Lawfare”) who occasionally contributes commentary to this blog, has a new paper up at SSRN: “Valor’s Vices: Against a State Duty to Risk Forces in Armed … Read more »
In a conversation several years ago about what was then simply a hypothesized US military exit from Afghanistan, a friend told me, think of the CIA as the French Foreign Legion. My friend meant by that the long-standing tradition of … Read more »
An irony of contemporary intellectual discourse is that the sharpest critique of the international human rights movement – or at least the critique of its foundational myths – is found these days in the sternly progressive pages of The Nation … Read more »
Sudan and newly-independent South Sudan have featured in many news stories over the last several years; a headline in today’s Washington Post, for example, reads “South Sudan: Sudan bombed 2 oil wells in South Sudan, is massing troops near … Read more »
Oral argument transcripts from the Supreme Court hearing this morning: Kiobel and Mohamad. Update: Opinio Juris is posting several posts and guest posts on the oral argument, including this one by Chimene Keitner. The comments to my … Read more »
Along with the earlier reading on drones in Pakistan by Pia Zubair Shah in Foreign Policy, also check out Council on Foreign Relations fellow Micah Zenko’s short piece in the same March-April 2012 issue, “10 Things You Didn’t Know About … Read more »
Journalist Pir Zubair Shah writes in the March-April 2012 issue of Foreign Policy. My Drone War: American drones have changed everything for al Qaeda and its local allies in Pakistan, becoming a fact of life in a secret war that … Read more »
The technological frontiers of conflict include cyberwar, robotics, and autonomous lethal weapons. It is time to add a new one: the use of neuroscience in conflict. Whether by creating new weapons to be deployed against an enemy, cognitive enhancements to … Read more »
Here is your moment of Not-Zen for the day (with thanks to my student Daniel). (With apologies to the senior editors of Lawfare for momentarily lowering the tone.)
With the Supreme Court scheduled to hear arguments over corporate liability in the Alien Tort Statute later this month, this short book chapter makes for a good, useful read. Dr. Eric De Brabandere is an associate professor of international law … Read more »
I hope it is not snarkish to hope that by the time I hit “publish” on this post, the director of the National Constitution Center’s “Peter Jennings Project,” Todd Brewster, will have corrected his article this morning on the Huffington … Read more »
Following the splendid University of Virginia School of Law conference last Friday at which DOS Legal Adviser Harold Koh delivered the keynote address, Notre Dame professor and Opinio Juris blogger Roger Alford commented on part of Koh’s speech in which … Read more »
John Bellinger’s last post on the amicus filings on behalf of defendants in the Kiobel Alien Tort Statute case, to be heard in the Supreme Court later this month, made me think this conference at UVA law school tomorrow … Read more »
David Bosco writes Foreign Policy’s The Multilateralist blog and is the author of the fine 2009 book, Five to Rule Them All: The UN Security Council and the Making of the Modern World and, finally, is my American University friend … Read more »
Ashley Deeks (formerly senior State Department lawyer and currently a fellow at Columbia Law School) has posted to SSRN a new piece appearing in Virginia Journal of International Law, ‘Unwilling or Unable’: Toward an Normative Framework for Extra-Territorial Self-Defense. … Read more »
Journalist Shane Harris (senior writer for Washingtonian magazine and author of the well-received 2010 book, The Watchers) has written a briefing paper for the Hoover Institution’s Task Force on National Security and Law’s Emerging Threats series, Out of the Loop: … Read more »
Thomas B. Nachbar is a most remarkable law professor. A few years ago, after having achieved wide recognition as a senior University of Virginia scholar known for his work in technology and regulation, he joined the US Army Reserve as … Read more »
As drone aircraft become commonplace in civilian settings – everything from police surveillance to environmental groups tracking whaling vessels to hobbyists and much, much more – and as they become more varied in size and pretty much everything else, well, … Read more »
The headline news from this Congressional Research Service report (which comes courtesy of Wired’s Danger Room, in a very handy article by Spencer Ackerman) is that, today, nearly one in three US warplanes is a drone:
Remember when the
Last October 2011, Harvard Law School’s Richard Fallon posted to SSRN an essay entitled, “Scholars’ Briefs and the Vocation of a Law Professor,” which raised serious questions about the ethics of law professors signing onto amicus briefs in a wide … Read more »
Happy New Year to all Lawfare readers. Starting this month, Lawfare will be offering a new feature, which I will be editing alongside the Book Reviews. This new feature (tentatively titled just plain “Reviews”) will bring to Lawfare readers a … Read more »
Thursday, May 23, 2013
Leading the news: President Obama speaks today at the National Defense University on counterterrorism policy. Many are previewing the speech, including John. According to the New York Times’s Charlie Savage and Peter Baker, Obama will announce more stringent targeting criteria for non-battlefield strikes. This approach will govern the use of force against both citizens and non-citizens.
Here are the Washington … Read more »
