Matthew Waxman is a law professor at Columbia Law School, where he co-chairs the Program on Law and National Security. He is also co-chair of the Cybersecurity Center at Columbia University’s Data Science Institute, as well as Adjunct Senior Fellow for Law and Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. He previously served in senior policy positions at the State Department, Defense Department, and National Security Council. After graduating from Yale Law School, he clerked for Judge Joel M. Flaum of the U.S. Court of Appeals and Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter
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On its anniversary, the Montgomery Ward episode is a stark reminder of what unleashing wartime government power over industry has actually looked like.
The outcome of the war—and the means necessary to achieve it—led to the war’s most noteworthy constitutional precedents.
The Millard Fillmore administration’s diplomatic machinations toward Hawaii are a curious example of the executive branch regarding itself as constitutionally empowered to threaten war but constrained from unilaterally carrying out that threat.
A new set of essays explores the state and possible trajectory of modern war powers.
In the course of researching a book, I’ve come across many episodes that Benjamin Wittes and I like to call “Weird War Powers $h*t.” One of my favorites is a story about American constitutional war powers and actual $h*t. It’s a story about very expensive bird-$h*t, or guano, and how one of the 19th century’s most important thinkers on war powers nearly stumbled the nation, figuratively speaking, into a giant pile of it.
Daniel Webster and War Powers
On this date in 1854, the U.S. Navy bombarded and torched the town of Greytown, in present-day Nicaragua. The event gave rise to a federal court opinion by Justice Samuel Nelson favored by modern-day lawyers who believe that the president wields vast unilateral power to use military force. The story behind the case reveals much more about how presidential naval powers, as well as congressional checks, operated in the mid-19th century.
Durand v. Hollins
In a new Washington Quarterly article titled “Presidential Alliance Powers,” we wrestle with a subject that has become familiar in these pages: the chief executive’s ability to dismantle American alliances. We argue that although many Trump foreign policy critics worry that his disdain for American alliances such as NATO might lead him to withdraw the United States, the more subtle, probable and already-manifest danger is that he weakens U.S. alliances from within.