Professor Pildes is the Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law and Co-Faculty Director for the Program on Law and Security at NYU School of Law. His scholarship focuses on legal issues concerning the structure of democratic institutions and politics, separation of powers, administrative law, and national-security law. A clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall at the United States Supreme Court, Professor Pildes has been named a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Carnegie Scholar. Full bio »
There are many important strands to President Obama’s national-security speech, but I want to focus on just one particularly noteworthy element. In clear terms, President Obama announced today that the same substantive standards apply to targeted killings operations against non-American … Read more »
I recently posted an essay, with co-author Sam Issacharoff, on what we conceive to be the key legal, institutional, and process issues concerning the use of drones for targeted killings — and even more importantly, what the underlying forces are … Read more »
One of this country’s most knowledgeable writers about Yemen is Greg Johnsen, author of The Last Refuge: Yemen, Al-Queda, and America’s War in Arabia. Johnsen is often read as arguing that American drone strikes in Yemen do more harm … Read more »
The central substantive issue, legally and morally, in the administration’s Targeted Killing White Paper is how the concept of an “imminent threat” should be understood. This is where much of the debate is going to focus. Already, outrage from American … Read more »
In an earlier post, here, I described an article I was working on, with my colleague Sam Issacharoff, on detention, targeted killings, and the fundamental transformation we see taking place in the practice, morality, and law concerning the legitimate … Read more »
I will soon be posting on SSRN, with my co-author Sam Issacharoff, a draft academic article that offers a broad, integrated conceptual and legal framework for understanding specific counterterrorism legal and policy issues, such as detention and targeted killings. Given … Read more »
In an essay entitled Law and the President that I’ve just published in the Harvard Law Review, I began by providing a brief historical and political perspective on shifting views of presidential power over the course of the 20th and … Read more »
Forthcoming next month in the Harvard Law Review is an essay of mine entitled Law and the President. The essay, here, explores the extent to which law constrains the exercise of presidential power in both domestic and foreign … Read more »
Attorney General Eric Holder will apparently give a public address on Monday that will provide a fuller explanation and justification for the government’s policies on targeted killings, including for the targeted killing of an American citizen in Yemen. Other administration … Read more »
I want to put discussion of whether the government should publicly disclose the full legal framework behind its targeted killings program, including the killing of Al-Aulaqi, an American citizen, in a larger and more general philosophical and political context. Across … Read more »
As Bobby notes, the recently announced criminal prosecution of Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, captured overseas almost three months ago by U.S. military forces, could be an important test of an emerging hybrid model for handling alleged terrorism cases that offers an … Read more »
First, my thanks to Ben, Jack, and Bobby for permitting me to become an affiliated blogger on this terrific site.
We are likely soon to get a test of how seriously Congress takes all of the War Powers Resolution (WPR). … Read more »
Monday, June 17, 2013
As John noted over the weekend, Clifford Sloan has been selected as the Department of State’s envoy for closing the GTMO detention center. Here are the Washington Post story and Politico story on the decision.
The Guardian has released yet another wave of classified materials, this time from the British agency GCHQ. They indicate that foreign government officials’ communications were monitored during international conferences.… Read more »
