Chimène Keitner is the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at the University of California at Davis. She is a leading international law authority and served for a number of years at the State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser. She is the author of a lengthy piece in Lawfare about South Africa's petition under the Genocide Convention against Israel in the International Court of Justice. Chimène joined Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to talk about the litigation. What is So...
Jan 17, 2024•57 min
Over the last two months, Houthi militants have waged more than 27 attacks against merchant shipping and U.S. and partner forces in the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, purportedly in response to the war in Gaza. These attacks have significantly disrupted global shipping and surged the Middle East into an even more precarious security situation. Following a large-scale Houthi attack on U.S. and British ships, the U.S. and U.K. on Jan. 11 launched over 150 munitions target...
Jan 16, 2024•50 min
From March 4, 2017: Yesterday, Just Security and the Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law hosted Benjamin Wittes for a conversation on a question about the path of the Trump presidency so far: what happens when we can’t take the president’s oath of office seriously? Ben’s talk focused on an essay he and Quinta Jurecic posted to Lawfare simultaneously with the speech, in which they argued that the presidential oath—little ...
Jan 15, 2024•1 hr 3 min
This week on Rational Security , Quinta and Scott were joined by Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett to discuss the week’s big national security and courtroom news, including: “Ergo Omnes.” South Africa has brought Israel to the International Court of Justice for actions relating to its military campaign in Gaza, based on a novel legal theory that alleges Israeli violations of the Genocide Convention and asserts standing by virtue of the universal obligation to prevent genocide. ...
Jan 14, 2024•1 hr 18 min
It's another episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” recorded on January 11 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Zoom. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke with Lawfare Senior Editors Quinta Jurecic and Roger Parloff, and Lawfare Legal Fellow Anna Bower, about the closing arguments in the New York civil case, about the Supreme Court's decision to grant Trump's petition for it to review the Colorado Supreme Court's decision barring him from the ballot under the 14th...
Jan 13, 2024•1 hr 23 min
From September 26, 2015: On this week’s Lawfare Podcast , Gregory Johnsen outlines the current state-of-play in Yemen. Johnsen, who is a writer-at-large for Buzzfeed News , a doctoral candidate at Princeton University, and an all-things-Yemen-expert, walks Ben through the byzantine power politics in Sanaa that led to the conflict now engulfing Yemen and he explains why the war shouldn’t be viewed as just another Sunni-Shia fight. Yet while he clarifies that the issues that sparked th...
Jan 13, 2024•41 min
On January 11, 2024, Donald J. Trump arrived in a New York courtroom for closing arguments in the civil fraud case against the former president, his company, and his adult sons. The suit, brought by the state’s attorney general Letitia James, alleges that Trump and his company misled lenders about the former president’s net worth in order to secure better business deals. The case is not Trump’s only legal trouble, but it’s one that could have a consequential impact for his family business and th...
Jan 12, 2024•44 min
Brandon Stoddard was one of the most accomplished executives in broadcast television history. In his career at ABC, he helped bring to the small screen such legendary mini-series as “Roots” and “The Winds of War,” as well as the acclaimed television series “Moonlighting” and “Roseanne.” But arguably his most consequential and controversial decision was to air the made-for-TV movie “The Day After,” which graphically depicted the effects of a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Un...
Jan 11, 2024•52 min
The Israeli Supreme Court—in the middle of the war in Gaza—handed down a decision that amounts to a kind of death blow to Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu's judicial reform project. Before October 7, judicial overhaul was all that anybody was talking about in Israeli politics—you know, a five-part legislative plan to assert parliamentary control over the judiciary and reduce Israel's checks and balances into a more majoritarian system. Only one part of it passed, and the Supreme Court has now...
Jan 11, 2024•56 min
Yesterday, a panel of judges at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in former President Trump's appeal of Judge Chutkan's denial of his claims of presidential immunity in the Jan. 6 case. On a livestream yesterday afternoon to talk over what happened in every phase of the oral arguments, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke with Lawfare Legal Fellow Anna Bower who was in the room for the arguments, and Lawfare Senior Editors Scott R. Anderson, Quinta Jurecic, and Roge...
Jan 10, 2024•1 hr
Michael J. Gottlieb is a litigation partner at the Willkie law firm. He is a long-time national security lawyer, served in Barack Obama's White House Counsel's office, and used to be the civilian lead on a task force that built rule of law institutions in Afghanistan. Late last year, he won a $148 million dollar judgment against Rudy Giuliani on behalf of election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman. He joined Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to talk about the case, how he and the advocac...
Jan 09, 2024•52 min
On Tuesday, Jan. 9, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is set to hear oral argument in United States v. Trump . Trump, indicted in D.C. for alleged crimes related to election interference, is appealing the trial court’s denial of his motion to dismiss based on presidential immunity and constitutional grounds. Ahead of the hearing, we gathered an all-star team to discuss the merits of Trump’s appeal and how the D.C. Circuit might rule. Lawfare Legal Fellow and Courts Correspondent Anna Bower sat d...
Jan 08, 2024•51 min
This week on Rational Security , Quinta and Scott were joined by Lawfare Legal Fellow Anna Bower to talk through the week’s big national security news, including: “Hamas, No Más.” A senior Hamas official was recently killed in an attack in Beirut, in what many believe was an operation by Israel—a country whose leaders have pledged to target Hamas’s leaders wherever they might be, though it has not formally acknowledged involvement in this particular attack. But pursuing such action a...
Jan 07, 2024•1 hr 7 min
It's another episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” recorded on January 4 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Zoom. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Legal Fellow Anna Bower and Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff to discuss all of the Section 3 litigation happening across the country from Colorado to Maine. They talked about where the D.C. case stands and whether the Jan. 6 trial will start on March 4. And they took questions from a live audie...
Jan 06, 2024•1 hr 25 min
From December 11, 2018: Last week, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Gregory Johnsen, a former member of the U.N. Security Council Panel of Experts on Yemen and the author of the book "The Last Refuge: Yemen, Al-Qaeda, and America’s War in Arabia," to do a deep dive on the conflict in Yemen: its origins; its current state; and the role Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United States have played and are likely to play moving forward. Joining Ben and Greg was Daniel Byman, senior fellow at the Brookings Ins...
Jan 06, 2024•1 hr 1 min
Last month, at COP28 in Dubai, the Republic of the Marshall Islands unveiled its sweeping national climate adaptation plan, the multi-year product of government officials interviewing thousands of Marshallese residents across the country’s dozens of coral atolls. The plan is ambitious and groundbreaking because it has to be. As John Silk, foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, said in September, “We call it our national adaptation plan, but it is really our survival plan.” Lawfare Manag...
Jan 05, 2024•43 min
From the protests in Brazil initially focused on bus fares to the protests in Hong Kong seeking to stop an extradition bill to the protests across the Middle East now collectively referred to as the "Arab Spring," the political and economic mass demonstrations from 2010 to 2020 made it a decade of public protest like no other. Yet the vast majority of these efforts failed to bring about their desired changes--and many of them actually led to the opposite of what they wanted. Vincent Bevins, auth...
Jan 04, 2024•1 hr 13 min
The conflict between Israel and Hamas is provoking heated debates about which side is in the right. Each accuses the other of things like war crimes. Oftentimes, they’re expressing a political or moral judgment—but the fact is, these are also legal terms. So for this discussion, we’re going to step back from the debates and try to take a dispassionate look at the law that applies here—international humanitarian law, or IHL. To do that, Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with Gabor ...
Jan 04, 2024•57 min
In May 2023, Montana passed a new law that would ban the use of TikTok within the state starting on January 1, 2024. But as of today, TikTok is still legal in the state of Montana—thanks to a preliminary injunction issued by a federal district judge, who found that the Montana law likely violated the First Amendment. In Texas, meanwhile, another federal judge recently upheld a more limited ban against the use of TikTok on state-owned devices. What should we make of these rulings, and...
Jan 03, 2024•49 min
Welcome to our annual “Ask Us Anything” episode, a hallowed Lawfare tradition. Every news alert in 2023 seemed to bring new questions. But fear not, because Lawfare has answers. Lawfare senior editors answered listener-submitted questions on the Israel-Gaza War, military aid to Ukraine, the Trump trials, gag orders against the former president, the presidential pardon ability, violence against elected officials, efforts to combat corruption, and more. What a year!&nbs...
Jan 02, 2024•1 hr 24 min
From September 27, 2014: A few weeks ago, Benjamin Wittes began listening to a podcast called Hardcore History , which is the brainchild of a fellow named Dan Carlin. Carlin was doing a series of episodes on World War I, and Hardcore History is—let's just say—a different sort of podcast. The episodes are very long, very involved, and to Ben at least, completely riveting. Ben can't recommend it highly enough. Carlin, a former radio talk show host, also runs a podcast called Common Sen...
Jan 01, 2024•45 min
This week on Rational Security , Quinta and Scott rang in the New Year with co-host emeritus Benjamin Wittes by discussing some listener-submitted topics, including: What does the AUKUS deal mean for the Five Eyes intelligence relationship? How can courts enforce a gag order against former President Trump? What would a President Nikki Haley mean for the Republican Party’s foreign policy? Which is better, wizards or fighters? Could anything stop former President Trump from appointing a cabinet of...
Dec 31, 2023•1 hr 35 min
From February 9, 2019: From the increasing development of autonomous weapons systems to the expansion of the traditional battlefield to cyber and outer space, the evolution of warfare invites ethical and legal questions about what the future holds. In November 2018, Arnold & Porter's Veterans and Affiliates Leadership Organization hosted a panel discussion to explain what warfare will be like for the military veterans of the future. Former Air Force and Army general counsel and current Arnol...
Dec 30, 2023•1 hr 23 min
Former President Trump’s prosecution for mishandling classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate has brought an old law back to the front pages—the Espionage Act. Enacted more than a century ago, parts of that law allowing for the prosecution of those who mishandle or unduly disclose sensitive national security information, have helped provide the legal infrastructure for the modern classification system used to protect our country's most important secrets. And by some accounts, to limit debat...
Dec 29, 2023•55 min
This week, we're taking time off for the holidays, so we reached into the Chatter archives for one of our favorites. In this episode from January 13, 2022, Shane Harris and David Priess teamed up to talk with John Sipher, a former senior intelligence officer who has gone Hollywood. With his partners at Spycraft Entertainment, John is bringing compelling and, yes, accurate stories about espionage to the screen. Before working in the entertainment industry, he spent 28 years in the CIA, ...
Dec 28, 2023•1 hr 43 min
Between 1865 and 1872, the first iteration of the Ku Klux Klan conducted a reign of terror across the former Confederate States, harassing, intimidating, and murdering freedpeople and their white allies. As violence spread with impunity across the South, Congress, at President Ulysses S. Grant’s urging, passed three Enforcement Acts, which radically expanded the federal government's ability to protect individuals from violence when their state governments could or would not. Lawfare Associ...
Dec 28, 2023•41 min
The Supreme Court last month heard oral arguments in United States v. Rahimi , in which the Court will decide the constitutionality of a federal law that criminalizes the possession of firearms by individuals on whom state courts have imposed domestic violence protective orders. This case came to the Court following its June 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen . In that case, the Court determined that whether a law violates the Second Amendment depen...
Dec 27, 2023•40 min
The Supreme Court during World War II issued some of the most notorious opinions in its history, including the Japanese exclusion case, Korematsu v. United States , and the Nazi saboteur military commission case, Ex parte Quirin . For a fresh take on these and related cases and a broader perspective on the Supreme Court during World War II, Jack Goldsmith sat down with Cliff Sloan, a professor at Georgetown Law Center and a former Special Envoy for Guantanamo Closure, to discuss his new book , w...
Dec 26, 2023•1 hr 3 min
This week on Rational Security , Quinta and Scott were joined by Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett and Cyber Fellow Eugenia Lostri to talk through the big national security news waking us up from our long winter’s nap this week, including: “Rocky Mountain, Bye.” Colorado’s Supreme Court has bid goodbye to former President Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy (for now, at least), holding in a 4-3 ruling that he is disqualified as a candidate by virtue of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment...
Dec 25, 2023•1 hr 13 min
It's part two of our Lawfare year-end event. Yesterday, we brought you the headliner conversation with Adam Kinzinger. Today, it's three panels of Lawfare insiders talking about the year to come and the year that's passed. We did a panel on democracy, the Trump trials, and related matters. We did a panel on cybersecurity, cyber defense, and AI. And of course, we did a panel on foreign policy and the various crises that are overtaking American foreign policy. You can watch a video version of thei...
Dec 24, 2023•1 hr 30 min
