How should we understand CIA General Counsel Stephen Preston's speech at Harvard Law School the other day? It is not, like earlier speeches by senior administration lawyers and counterterrorism officials...

We now have a collection of speeches from the past two years by the Obama administration's top lawyers in the national security agencies and departments on targeted killing and (hypothetically speaking) ...

Rumor has it that sometime this week (perhaps as early as tomorrow), Congressmen Scott Rigell (R-VA) and Jeff Landry (R-LA) will introduce a bill titled the "Right to Habeas Corpus Act." In short, the bi...

An important predicate for the legal and political justification for the U.S.

A couple of weeks ago, I poked fun at the Virginia General Assembly's protest legislation aimed at the NDAA and wondered if Gov. Bob McDonnell would veto it. As things turned out, he didn't; he proposed ...

Nigeria seems to have just added some state practice to the debate about whether and when an armed conflict exists between a state and a terrorist group.  On Tuesday, the Nigerian Army’s Chief of Staff i...

The hearing begins again at 9:18. Judge Pohl enters and announces that he has held a meeting in chambers with counsel to discuss letters rogatory, which he will discuss on the record later. The other iss...

Pardon the interruption from the wall-to-wall Nashiri coverage, but before it disappears too far into the past, I wanted to flag United States v. Ali--a case in which the Court of Appeals for the Armed F...

The day’s final issue is a logistical one. In its motion AE56, the Government asks to take some depositions in Yemen. Judge Pohl has some hesitation here, and says as much. He nevertheless asks for clari...

Yesterday’s speech by CIA General Counsel Stephen Preston has generated criticism from Deborah Pearlstein, on Opinio Juris.

For more than a decade, the United States has asserted authority to detain without criminal charge in Afghanistan under color of the law of armed conflct (LOAC).  Because for the bulk of this period that...