Author Archive | Kenneth Anderson

Jack Goldsmith and Benjamin Wittes have been arguing for several days now at the Lawfare blog that the Obama administration should release either the Justice Department opinion approving the Al-Awlaki attack, suitably redacted, or some statement that puts out in some detail its legal reasoning.  The Washington Post has evidently read those posts closely, as […]

This is the title of a new paper by Steven Schwarcz of Duke University Law School on the shadowy phenomenon of states and muncipalities in the United States using special purpose entities to issue debt.  It is written in Steve’s customary crisp and calm style but, well, there is reason for serious concern.  Abstract: In […]

A journalist was in touch with me recently, asking about the legal and specifically Constitutional status of “wanted-dead or alive” in 19th century frontier days.  I don’t know anything about this, particularly as a historical Constitutional question, and propose to open it for knowledgeable responses from readers. First, to what extent was this actually a […]

Jack Goldsmith, writing at Lawfare, urges the Obama administration to release a redacted version of the Justice Department’s memo concluding that the targeting of Al-Awlaki was lawful – if not a redacted version, then some reasonably complete and authoritative statement of its legal reasoning.  I agree.  The nature of these operations abroad is that they […]

Ruth Wedgwood sends this announcement along: International Law Weekend 2011 — the world-famous gathering of the migrating flock of international lawyers for the fall season — begins on Thursday night, October 20, 2011, at the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, 42 West 44th Street, NYC, and continues at 9 a.m. […]

Roger Alford at Opinio Juris observes the paucity of cases involving international law issues in the new Supreme Court term, speaking of First Monday.  There are two – outlined at the link – an immigration case and the “birthplace on passport” case that has occasionally surfaced here at Volokh. In broader international or foreign relations […]

Eli Lake and John Barry at the Daily Beast sum up the Obama administration’s counterterrorism-on-offense doctrines.  Of particular interest is this paragraph stressing the largely unmentioned role of on-the-ground intelligence gathering and operations in order to make possible targeted strikes: And while the drones are the most outward signs of the covert campaigns that rage from […]

A musician friend with a gig at a local church posts this photo of the rules for the children’s Cherub Choir, which strike me as pretty good rules for life.  (Comments open.)

Lawfare links the newspaper coverage at this post.  Al-Aulaqi was an American-born radical Muslim cleric who had emerged as both a leading voice in Al Qaeda recruiting and propaganda over the internet and, according to the US government, was also involved in operations and operational planning with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, an offshoot […]

I think the Washington Post gets the right position on the utility and effectiveness of drones in targeted killing – including their limits.  The editorial principally addresses two different things, both raised in John Brennan’s summary statement of the administration’s counterterrorism policy at Harvard Law School a week ago.  The first is the question of […]

Below in full, The Gospel According to Luke, Chapter 2, King James Version.  As Christopher Hitchens once observed, Shakespeare and the KJV are the epicenters of the English language.  And a famous Bible translator, whose name escapes me now (and who did a highly regarded translation of Genesis some years ago), observed about the language […]

David Ignatius has a new column in a long series of columns criticizing the use of drones.  Those concerns largely amount to the “blowback” hypothesis – that the use of drones creates such resentment and ill-will that they produce more harm than good.  He frames this in today’s Washington Post as a comment on the […]

There has been a flurry of news reports on drones in the last few days; let me crib from Lawfare’s collection of links:  “The U.S. is building secret drone bases in Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Read Tim Mak’s report in the Politico here, the Washington Post’s coverage by Craig Whitlock and Greg Miller here, and the Telegraph’s Mike […]

This is the question posed by a blogger at Lead and Gold.  (It’s a riff on a conversation between Howard Kurtz and Ben Smith on Reliable Sources.) My answer, based on the comments of many professional print journalist friends over the last two years or so?  For professional, paid journalists, Twitter is partly a way […]

A few hours ago at a conference on national security sponsored by Harvard Law School and the Brookings Institution (as part of a new partnership on law and security issues), the White House’s senior counterterrorism official, John Brennan, gave what Marty Lederman calls the “most comprehensive single statement of the Obama Administration’s policies and practices […]