Last summer, I pointed out that U.S. law already authorizes the President to impose targeted economic sanctions to deter or punish Chinese aggression in the South China Sea. That none were imposed, howev...

The debate over the unprecedented conflicts of interest created by President-elect Donald Trump’s financial empire is at an impasse, perhaps in part because we have adopted a narrow understanding of what...

The other day President-Elect Trump released a video summarizing his plans for the first 100 days in office. Little noticed or remarked upon was his commitment (see 1:45 in the video) to ask the Departm...

Duterte declares fishing ban within Scarborough Shoal Presidents Duterte and Xi meet at APEC Summit (Photo: CNN)

Dawn Johnsen has a new essay in Foreign Affairs defending the Obama administration’s national security law legacy and drawing lessons for constraining the incoming Trump administration.

Katherine Hawkins at the Constitution Project tweeted some good points in response to my earlier posts on Trump, interrogation, and waterboarding (here and here). One concerns the possibility that the N...

Since Donald Trump’s election as president, I have had more than my share of inquiries from current and aspiring Justice Department attorneys about the ethics of service under the new President-elect. Th...

Since Donald Trump’s election two weeks ago, we have witnessed—on the pages of Lawfare, and throughout mainstream and social media—what my colleague Adrian Vermeule once described as “libertarian panic.”...

On October 28th, a federal judge in New York rejected a proposed settlement to the ongoing litigation concerning the New York City Police Department’s surveillance of Muslim communities in and around the...

Over at War on the Rocks, I have a post explaining that a new statute will be needed in order for General Mattis to serve as Secretary of Defense. It's been done once before, with George Marshall during...

In a prior post I discussed the Trump administration's apparent interest in reviving waterboarding as an interrogation method, noted that a federal statute forbids resort to any interrogation method not ...

During the course of his campaign, President-elect Donald Trump made a series of deeply concerning statements about how he would use the power of his presidency to officially discriminate against Muslims.

PDF version A review of Oleg Khlevniuk's Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator (Yale University Press, reprint edition, 2016). ***

Assad Regime Advances in Aleppo, Destroys Remaining Hospitals