The most puzzling line in the President’s strange speech last night was this: [E]ven though I possess the authority to order military strikes, I believed it was right, in the absence of a direct or immin...

Congratulations to John Carlin, who has been serving as the acting head of NSD since this past March.  From the White House comes the formal announcement of his nomination: THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the ...

Julian Ku is right to poke fun at the administration for conveying its vague and conclusory legal rationale for intervening in Syria through the reporting of the NYT’s Charlie Savage.  But vague and conc...

Sam Tanenhaus had an essay over the weekend in the NYT that I think is at bottom a “little c” conservative critique of President Obama’s Syria push.  But the essay makes little sense, at least to me. Ta...

Senators Manchin and Heitcamp are working on an alternative Syria Resolution that tentatively provides: The failure by the government of Bashar al-Assad to sign and comply with the [Chemical Weapons] Con...

The rhetoric of “punishment” has been a ubiquitous justification for intervening in Syria.

Last Saturday President Obama said he had “decided that the United States should take military action against Syrian regime targets,” and that he had made that decision “as Commander-in-Chief based on wh...

John Dehn, a professor at  Loyola University Chicago School of Law and  a Senior Fellow in West Point's Center for the Rule of Law, writes in with this comment about Syria and humanitarian intervention: ...

Lawfare-ers have been quite prolific in the debate over U.S. intervention in Syria.

Earlier today I said that President Obama’s dismissal of a Security Council authorization as a prerequisite for intervention in Syria “marks the death knell for the long-held USG view that humanitarian i...

Lurking behind international law arguments over a possible US armed intervention in Syria without Security Council authorization are fundamental divides over the nature of international law itself.  Thes...

Marty Lederman writes in with a response to my last post: A quick, response to Jack's reading of the President's remarks in Stockholm yesterday: One should be very cautious, of course, about reading too...