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...

Among the documents that Edward Snowden released are reports showing that the NSA had been picking up email and phone conversations by and among foreign leaders.  Among the alleged targets were officials...

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...

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...

I want to briefly unpack this extraordinary statement by President Obama yesterday in Sweden: [T]he truth of the matter is that under international law, Security Council resolution for self-defense or de...

I disagree with Peter Spiro’s take on Section 4 of the draft AUMF. Section 4 terminates the congressional authorization after 60 (or 90) days, but it does not affirmatively prohibit the President from u...

Ben observed last week that in the midst of the most significant war powers debate of this Presidency, many of the top national security legal positions in the Administration remain unfilled.

The draft Senate Syria AUMF contains a narrower authorization for the use of presidential force than the one the administration proposed.  But it is in some respects still broad, and it actually enhances...

I recently posted my new paper on The Constitutional Power to Threaten War (forthcoming, Yale Law Journal).  The basic idea is that existing debate and legal scholarship about constitutional war powers f...

As Congress moves to debate authorization for the use of force in Syria, and especially since there is some question about whether DOD has adequate funding for a strike in Syria, Congress may want to pon...