Developing Client-Ready Practitioners: Learning How to Practice National Security Law at Military Law Schools

The demand for trained and educated national security lawyers, including those in the military, is not going to lessen. The challenge is to meet the increasing demand with shrinking resources. The military services must first identify national security law as a core, mission-essential discipline. The services should integrate the joint and perhaps inter-agency legal community… Continue reading Developing Client-Ready Practitioners: Learning How to Practice National Security Law at Military Law Schools

National Security Law Pedagogy and the Role of Simulations

This article challenges the dominant pedagogical assumptions in the legal academy. It begins by briefly considering the state of the field of national security law, noting the rapid expansion in employment and the breadth of related positions that have been created post-9/11. It considers, in the process, how the legal academy has, as an institutional matter, responded to the… Continue reading National Security Law Pedagogy and the Role of Simulations

The Case of Colonel Abel

Early in the morning of June 21, 1957, almost exactly fifty-three years before the June 2010 arrests, Special Agents Edward Gamber and Paul Blasco of the FBI pushed their way into Room 839 at the Hotel Latham in Manhattan. The FBI agents sat a sleepy and half-naked Abel on his bed, identified themselves as charged with investigating matters of internal security, and questioned him for twenty minutes, insinuating knowledge of his espionage activities by addressing him as “Colonel.” The FBI agents told Abel that “if he did not ‘cooperate,’ he would be arrested before he left the room.” When Abel refused, the FBI signaled to agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (the INS, then under the authority of the Department of Justice), who were waiting outside. Under the close observation of the FBI agents, the INS agents arrested Abel, searched him and the contents of his room, and seized several items as evidence of Abel’s alienage.