Author Archive | Kenneth Anderson

I believe I’ve now read most of the leading reviews of Cheney’s memoirs, though I am only partway through In My Time.  (Lawfare’s Rafaella Wakeman provides a helpful roundup of the reviews, though VDH’s came out after that post.)  Of the reviews, Victor Davis Hanson’s is the most interesting and worth reading (it is posted […]

The ruling by Judge Rosemary Collyer was not unexpected; it provides that the CIA does not have to release records related to its drone-targeted killing program, as sought by the ACLU in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit.  The opinion is here, and Politico gives a brief summary of it here (h/t Lawfare).  Politico’s […]

On the first anniversary of 9/11, in September 2002, the Times Literary Supplement ran a review essay of mine on the meaning of memorials, monuments, and the skyline and landscape of New York City.  It talked about architecture and memorials, about how one memorializes an event like 9/11.  This was before much of anything had […]

Like many schools, my school – Washington College of Law, American University – is doing an event on 9/11 and the future of national security and counterterrorism.  Speaking immodestly, my school has an advantage in its senior national security scholars such as Dan Marcus as well as being located in DC, to be able to […]

I was a Teamster for a couple of years before I went to UCLA.  I didn’t think much about the union, it was just what you had to do to work loading and unloading trucks for Roadway Express.  Well paid, by blue collar unskilled standards, especially overtime, for that I was happy with the union. […]

I have taken the plunge and assigned Professor Bainbridge’s new self-published Amazon e-book, Directors as Auctioneers: A Concise Guide to Revlon-land, to my Business Associations class.  I’ve read it and it’s outstanding, but I had some trepidation about assigning a mandatory e-book to a class of 70.  However, I polled the class and asked how […]

I wanted to flag for reader attention two articles in the Washington Post on the CIA and JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command), and their evolving roles as central counterterrorism fighters.  The first is by Greg Miller and Julie Tate, “Since Sept. 11, CIA’s focus has taken lethal turn,” September 2, 2011.  The second is by […]

(H/T Insta).  Professor accused and on the run, presumed armed and dangerous, in San Bernardino, California: “To have an associate professor who is a member of the Devils Diciples and allegedly dealing methamphetamine is quite alarming. I mean, it’s unusual to say the least,” Sheriff Rod Hoops said at a news conference in San Bernardino.

John Bellinger writes at Lawfare on the 11th Circuit’s dismissal of Alien Tort Statute claims against former senior Bolivian government officials. (Jack Goldsmith served as defense co-counsel.) This case (opinion) involves former government officials, and so does not raise perhaps the most hotly-contested issue in ATS litigation today, corporate liability, on which there is now […]

Ryan Calo responds to my earlier post on whether a software engineer could win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in a post at Concurring Opinions that is considerably more profound and well-thought out than my original somewhat whimsical post – it being a product of no power or internet at home or at school.   […]

I just finished reading an essay by Ronald Coase I had not read before – indeed, hadn’t realized existed – on Adam Smith’s thought in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.  That book has occupied me a lot in the last three years, as an example of the tradition of moral psychology in economics that seems […]

The estimable Adam Entous and Siobhan Gorman of the Wall Street Journal’s national security reporting team have a good discussion of the targeted killing-drone strike on August 22, 2011 that killed Attiyah Abd al-Rahman, Al-Qaeda’s second in command. A considerable part of the Pakistani government’s irritation with the conduct of drone strikes is that the […]

One hundred years from now, might we see the Nobel Prize for literature awarded to the engineer of the algorithm that, embedded in a machine, produced the novel that might, in our era, have been the reason for the prize? (In my scenario, the algorithm is not literature on its own; it is exactly what […]

The Wall Street Journal’s Siobhan Gorman has an interesting profile today of Michael Morell, a veteran CIA insider (31 years in) who is tapped to help guide the new director, David Petraeus, as he steps out of the uniform and into the suit, through the maze of internal CIA culture. (It might be behind the […]

One persistent question about the crisis in the eurozone is why it is a crisis for the euro at all.  The sovereign debt of individual states is denominated in euros, but the issuer remains a national government, not the “eurozone” or the European Central Bank or the EU or anything other than Greece, Italy, Germany, […]