Latest in Scholarship
Law professor and former deputy assistant attorney general John Yoo this week declared, “What the framers thought was that the American people would judge a president at the time of an election. They would never have wanted an impeachment within a year of an election.”
The Hoover Institution will host a book event on Oct. 24 from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m., where Lawfare’s Jack Goldsmith will discuss his new book, “In Hoffa's Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth,” with William Galston of the Brookings Institution.
The American Association of Law Schools (AALS) Section on National Security Law seeks scholarly papers on any topic involving national security and the law. Three or more papers will be selected for presentation at the AALS 2020 Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., at the Section’s Jan. 5 Works in Progress session. The author of the best overall paper will be invited to publish it in the Journal of National Security Law and Policy, subject to the Journal’s always helpful peer review. This Call for Papers is open to any tenure-track faculty member teaching at an ABA-accredited law school.
In the past two decades, the United States has applied a growing number of foreign and security measures directly targeting individuals—natural or legal persons. Administrative agencies have taken the lead in designing and implementing these measures. Empowered by delegations from Congress and the president, agencies largely control related fact-finding, target selection, routine management and administrative review of individualized measures.
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
I recently was a guest lecturer on covert action in a law school seminar. For anyone interested, my instructional approach (fictional scenario, issues for consideration, operational proposals) is available here —feel free to use it (or, better yet, improve on it). In this post I offer a few practitioner-focused thoughts on the “why,” “what” and “how” that informed my planning for this class. I hope this background description and approach are useful to others teaching about covert action.
In the early 1980s, Soviet intelligence began Operation Infektion—a campaign to erode trust in the U.S. government by orchestrating a series of scientific papers and news articles arguing that the U.S. government created the HIV/AIDS virus.
Homeland security issues have emerged as among the most critical facing our country. Massive hurricanes devastated large swaths of the United States in 2017, the recovery from which is not over. Hostile governments and criminal groups have targeted American cyber and critical infrastructure, including U.S. elections. Ebola and Zika originated abroad but emerged at America’s shores. Central American asylum seekers have overwhelmed U.S. border authorities, while Washington has been paralyzed over disputes about how to respond.
This Lawfare post summarizes a longer essay we are publishing today with the Hoover Working Group on National Security, Technology and Law. Our essay addresses whether governments ever have a justified basis for treating targets of surveillance differently, in any way, based on nationality. This issue is of general importance and has become particularly important in the current legal debates about whether the U.S.
When the Mueller investigation began in May 2017, many people hoped that it would shed light on what was perhaps the central question regarding Russia’s intervention in the 2016 U.S. election: whether the Trump campaign actively colluded with the Russian government’s interference operation.