Author Archive | Kenneth Anderson

I’m pleased to note that my book, Living with the UN: American Responsibilities and International Order, is now available at Amazon and also at Barnes & Noble (including as a Nook book; a Kindle version will be up soon).  Which is to say, the book is out there in the way that truly matters – and […]

(Notes from my panel presentation on covert action and international law, at the Harvard National Security Journal annual symposium yesterday.  Very fine conference and congratulations to HLS student James Moxness, who served as organizer.)  Seen from the standpoint of the emerging regulation of covert uses of force, cyberwarfare and targeted killing using drones share several […]

Although I am generally quite positive on the use of drones for targeted killing and such uses of forces abroad, I also think their use domestically raises many crucial privacy and other issues.  While many of those domestic use issues are about privacy, in some instances the issue is privacy in relation to a government […]

Co-Conspirator Jonathan offers a possible explanation for why legal elites, particularly the legal academy and the  elite legal academy, got the Obamacare oral arguments so wrong.  He points to Greg Sargent and Peter Suderman,  and Suderman’s discussion carries us onwards to Jonathan Haidt’s very interesting work.  I’m not a constitutional law scholar and I’ve pretty […]

My confreres at Opinio Juris tell me that Harold Koh, Legal Adviser to the State Department, has given OJ the text of his address on Syria at the on-going annual meetings of the American Society of International Law (ASIL) with a request to post it. The speech was (updated, sorry) on-the-record; the text is now […]

Greg Miller has a fascinating front-page story in the Washington Post today (appears to be behind a free registration wall) profiling Roger, the mysterious head of the Counterterrorism Center at the CIA, a key figure in the pursuit of Bin Laden, and a principal architect of the drones program.  Here’s the money quote, borrowing from […]

That’s the title of a new paper in the Stanford Law Review by Columbia Law School’s Matthew Waxman (link to SSRN).  Federalism is under considerable discussion these days, of course, largely in relation to the “economic Constitution.”  But there are important questions of federalism raised by the “national security Constitution” as well, and Waxman’s article explores […]

Jhesus-Maria, King of England, and you, Duke of Bedford, who call yourself regent of the Kingdom of France, you, Guillaume de la Poule, count of Suffort, Jean, sire of Talbot, and you, Thomas, sire of Scales, who call yourselves lieutenants of the Duke of Bedford, acknowledge the summons of the King of Heaven.  Render to […]

This paper, by University of Baltimore’s Richard W. Bourne, deserves wide attention.  I fear it won’t get it, however.  The Coming Crash in Legal Education: How We Got There, and Where We Go Now.  It is written in clear, plain, and personal language; it is factually well-informed about the roots of the impending economic crisis […]

Many VC readers, I know, have a keen interest in Civil War history.  Over at Lawfare, senior national security lawyer at DOD and retired Navy JAG Alan G. Kaufman – who occasionally comments here at Volokh – offers a striking review-essay of Stephen C. Neff’s 2010 book, Justice in Blue and Gray: A Legal History […]

Yesterday was a busy day in International-Foreign-Relations-Law-Land, between the Eric Holder speech on national security and targeted killing at Northwestern University and the quite unexpected announcement, noted by Co-Conspirator Jonathan below, that the Alien Tort Statute case of Kiobel will be re-argued in the Supreme Court.  Jonathan points to SCOTUSblog for details – let me […]

Over at Lawfare blog, I have posted a longish essay on the proposition that as the US draws down its military forces in Afghanistan, the CIA should take on the lead security role in the country.  The Lawfare post considers that proposition and asks what, as a corollary, needs to be articulated as the legal […]