Detention and Denial: The Case for Candor After Guantanamo

I have received a number of inquiries from Lawfare readers about my my new book, Detention and Denial: The Case for Candor after Guantanamo. I am told there were sightings of it at Brookings this past week. Amazon has apparently not yet received its shipment, but the Kindle edition is now available. As soon as the hardcover version is too, I will publish a few choice excerpts from the book on Lawfare. At the risk of sounding self-serving,  I think that anyone who has been engaged--positively or negatively--by my discussions of detention, Guantanamo, and habeas litigation on this site will find the book similarly engaging. Detention and Denial is very brief--designed to be readable in a sitting--and non-technical. I wrote it in an attempt to distill in an essayistic form some of the themes with which I had been working over the past few years in a series of more technical papers on designing reasonable detention policy, on the emerging law of detention in the habeas litigations, and on the theory and practice of preventive detention in American law--a paper that will be released shortly. I wrote it to force myself to condense into a single cohesive source my views on detention both for those disinclined to read the underlying papers and because, as any editorial writer knows in his soul, one doesn't truly understand a policy problem until one can treat it briefly and in a fashion that an intelligent high school student can read and understand. I mean this book to be my last substantial work on the subject of detention, a kind of summary of a few years' worth of intensive thought and effort from which I now mean to move on. In that sense, the book and this blog have an interesting symbiosis. In the future, Lawfare will be my principal outlet for discussing detention (though Bobby and Larkin and I are preparing a new edition of our paper on the habeas process as lawmaking, which we will endeavor to keep up to date in the future). With the publication of Detention and Denial, speaking quite candidly, I have now said everything I know how to say on the subject.