Teaching National Security Law

Fourteen years ago this coming weekend, I was standing on top of the World Trade Center. It had been a long summer at work. The Justice Department office I worked in at the time was operating at a heightened pace. A couple law school friends and I drove up to New York for Labor Day weekend 2001 on a whim, and one of our group had never seen the view. I said it was a once-in-a-lifetime must, and up we went.

Once in a lifetime, indeed.

For the Motion:

Alan Dershowitz, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

Michael Lewis, Professor of Law, Ohio Northern University School of Law

Against the Motion:

I'm happy to report that I've recently completed drafting an article that has been much on my mind for the past few years.  Beyond the Battlefield, Beyond al Qaeda: The Destabilizing Legal Architecture of Counterterrorism (Michigan Law Review, forthcoming 2013) is now posted to SSRN.  In it, I argue that (i) there is a widespread perception that the legal framework for detention and targeting has reached a point of relative stability thanks to a remarkable wave of interbranch and inter-party consensus since 2008; (ii) this facade depends almost en

In my haste to survey the NSL-related panels at this week's AALS Annual Meeting, I missed one of the "Hot Topics" sessions--a plenary discussion of "Political Crises and Constitutionalism: War," with a special focus on the use of force and/in Libya... It's scheduled for 10:30 a.m to noon on Saturday (alas, at the same time as the civil rights and national security panel), in Salon 1 of the Marriott Ballroom, and features an all-star cast, including Curt Bradley, Marty Lederman, Trevor Morrison, and Matt Waxman (moderated by Vicki Jackson).