* forthcoming scholarship – Wittes, Goldsmith, and Chesney blogging on national security law and related topics
Perhaps this one doesn’t quite qualify as “scholarship.” It certainly qualifies as shameless self-promotion.
Ben Wittes, Jack Goldsmith, and I have launched a blog (www.lawfareblog.com). We’re calling it Lawfare: Hard National Security Choices (note that we’re putting our own spin on the word “lawfare”). Here’s the description that Ben put in the opening post:
Welcome to Lawfare, a new blog by Robert Chesney, Jack Goldsmith, and myself. For those readers familiar with our prior writings, our subject will come as no surprise: We mean to devote this blog to that nebulous zone in which actions taken or contemplated to protect the nation interact with the nation’s laws and legal institutions. We will, I am sure, construe this subject broadly to include subjects as far-flung as cybersecurity, Guantánamo habeas litigation, targeted killing, biosecurity, universal jurisdiction, the Alien Tort Statute, the state secrets privilege and countless other related and not-so-related matters.
We have all written extensively in this space, both individually and collectively. Our purpose in creating this blog is to create a collective outlet for shorter writing that is more responsive to the ongoing events.
The name Lawfare refers both to the use of law as a weapon of conflict and, perhaps more importantly, to the depressing reality that America remains at war with itself over the law governing its warfare with others. This latter sense of the word—which is admittedly not its normal usage—binds together a great deal of our work over the years. It is our hope to provide an ongoing commentary on America’s lawfare, even as we participate in many of its skirmishes.
I hope you find this interesting, and that you’ll pass the link around to anyone you think might be interested. The preliminary posts cover a range of issues including commentary of detention, al Bihani, US v. Ghailani, targeted killing and the al-Aulaki civil suit.
As for the relationship of the blog to the listserv: while some items I post to this list will also show up on the new blog, most will not – and those that do will show up with editorial context rather than just the largely descriptive accounts posted through the listserv. The listserv, for its part, will not ordinarily carry the posts that Ben, Jack, and I put up on the blog (though I may occasionally draw some of them to your attention). In short, I encourage you to stay involved with the listserv, but also to add the blog to your RSS feed or to your daily list of online readings.