Latest in War Powers
We have released a new paper, forthcoming as a chapter in the Cambridge Companion to the United States Constitution, which takes on the tensions created by these features of American constitutionalism and presidential practice in the national security area.
In 1917, Charles Evans Hughes declared that the “power to wage war is the power to wage war successfully.” Here’s what he meant, and why we should care today.
Captain Smith’s brief opposing the Government’s Motion to Dismiss.
President's Obama's light-footprint warfare has established precedents that will leave a remarkable legal legacy of presidential power to use military force that poses a distinctive challenge to U.S. democracy and military strategy going forward.
The government has just filed its brief responding to Captain Smith’s challenge to the president’s unilateral war against ISIS.
The Obama administration's lawyers concluded that intervention in Syria aganist Assad would be lawful under domestic and international law. But whether they were right may matter less than that Clinton is leading the presidential polls and that her former State Department lawyer has robust views about the president’s power of unilateral humanitarian intervention.
Prompted by the “dissent memo” signed by 51 career State Department diplomats, several prominent law professors are debating the Obama administration's internal deliberations about the legality of intervention in Syria against Assad. But I don’t think the debate has perfectly reflected what my reporting showed.
The DOD airstrike that may have killed Taliban leader Mullah Mansour is interesting, from a legal perspective, at many levels. From an international law perspective, as Marty Lederman explains here, it looks to be another example of action under color of the much-discussed unwilling/unable principle (unless of course there was conse
These kinds of advocacy lawsuits against the President in the national security arena often have perverse effects on the resulting law. The intent is generally to force constraints onto the executive branch, but the further along this lawsuit gets, the greater the risk it will result in less, rather than more, accountability and constraint on the Executive’s power.
An outline of the key points in the complaint submitted by Captain Nathan Smith challenging the legality of President Obama's war against the Islamic State.