The Situation: Fifteen Years of Lawfare

The Situation on Tuesday spotlighted a number of things FBI Director Kash Patel testified to before the Senate Judiciary Committee that I, for one, do not believe. 

I will have more to say about Patel’s testimony in the coming days, but today I want to discuss a happier subject: Lawfare’s birthday. 

I forgive you if you missed our fifteenth birthday when it slipped unobtrusively by on Sept. 1. There were some other things going on, I know, and institutional birthdays are even more forgettable than those of distant relatives and friends. What’s more, Facebook probably didn’t remind you that it was Lawfare’s birthday, much less that it was our quinceañera. 

But yes, this website is now 15 years old. We are having get-together tomorrow evening to celebrate, to which a few tickets are still available. 

But I want to share with the broader community some thoughts I will no doubt communicate in person to those present. 

I never imagined when Bobby Chesney, Jack Goldsmith, and I started this site that it would come to play the role that it has in our national conversation. 

We imagined it as a blog for the three of us that would focus on wonky legal issues that we were all obsessed with but which didn’t have wide penetration in the public consciousness. We imagined it as focused on counterterrorism—which was then the overpowering concern of American national security policy. 

I never imagined the broad expansion of topics the site has undertaken over the years. I never imagined our expansion into technology policy, much less that Lawfare would become a hub of discussion of undersea cables. I never imagined us becoming a locus of discussion of the protection of democracy from America’s own government. 

I never imagined Lawfare’s having employees, let alone a Monday editorial meeting of more than 20 people. 

I never imagined having a court-reporting team. 

I never imagined having fellows come to Lawfare from the FBI or the National Security Council. 

I really never imagined having a fellow based in Kyiv. 

I never imagined producing a daily podcast, along with two other regular podcasts, or that we would produce multiple narrative podcast series on everything from the Mueller investigation to the history of the special immigrant visa program to the tangled story of U.S.-Ukrainian relations. 

I didn’t imagine we would publish books. 

I didn’t imagine we would publish an academic paper series, let alone several. 

I certainly never imagined we would have a live online video course in hacking.

I never imagined working with year after year of student contributors, interns, and junior staff who would make astonishing contributions to the site, to the law, and to American public debate. 

I never imagined that we would build one of the world’s largest repositories of thought and primary source texts and analysis on democracy, security, law, and policy. 

I thought we were starting a blog. I only realized slowly that we were creating an institution.

We made a few decisions early on that have guided the site in important ways. The first of these was to err on the side of experimentation. We have tried a lot of things over the years that haven’t worked. And we have tended to iterate projects over and over again. The average Lawfare article today looks and sounds a bit different from in the early days, when we didn’t spend much time or energy explaining things to lay readers. The Lawfare Podcast today sounds dramatically different than it did at the beginning, when I hosted all of the episodes. We have thrown a lot of spaghetti at the wall over the years, and the Lawfare you see today is the accumulation of that spaghetti that has stuck over time. 

The experimental quality of Lawfare has been critically important as the blogosphere morphed into the social media age, and as podcasts took over the world and then were gobbled up by the YouTube and livestreaming ecosystem. This dramatic set of changes in the ecosystem has coincided with equally dramatic changes in Lawfare’s subject matter. Counterterrorism receded in importance to American security policy, even as intelligence authorities became intensely contested, great power competition reemerged, and then all became sublimated to disputes over the proper posture of the executive branch of American government itself. 

So what Lawfare is as a set of products evolved not merely in terms of the form and presentation of material but also in terms of the substantive content of our work. 

Through it all, a few things have remained constant. The first is the desire to work with the very best people to produce the very best material on the subject matters we work on. The idea is not merely that Lawfare should be better than other places, but that it should be dramatically better. Early on in the life of the site, my friend Kenneth Anderson told me that the site’s power and value emanated from the fact that it speaks as a “voice of authority,” not as merely one voice among many. This has always stuck with me.

That authority comes from many fountains—not all of them conventional. Yes, in the case of a lot of our writers, it comes from some traditional sources: deep academic work or government experience of some kind. In other cases, however, it just comes from the fact that people read and analyze documents carefully, or they go to court hearings and describe them in greater depth than other publications can do. In still other cases, it comes from just the fact that someone at Lawfare bothered to do a piece of work that nobody else bothered to do.

What are Lawfare’s next 15 years going to look like? I have no idea. 

I will note that we are staffing up. At a time when other media organizations are downsizing, Lawfare is growing. At a time of media consolidation, Lawfare remains independent. At a time when other publications are chasing clicks for ever-scarcer advertising dollars, we don’t rely on website advertising. And the appetite for the site’s work certainly isn’t going away. Reader support constitutes a growing percentage of our budget. 

So the next 15 years? Bring it on. I’m looking forward to it.  

The Situation continues tomorrow—and we’ll be right there with it.