war powers

Episode 20 – Rebecca Ingber on Legally Sliding into War

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In this episode I speak with Rebecca Ingber, Professor of Law at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law, and formerly a lawyer in the Office of Legal Advisor in the U.S. Department of State. We discuss a recent essay in which Rebecca examines how international and domestic law operate together to facilitate the incremental moves by which the U.S. initiates, expands, and extends armed conflicts. The process involves legal justifications and rationales for each step towards war, with legal interpretations that, while made in good faith, are often strained and even beyond the pale. What is more, Congress and the courts tend to look to the international law principles as limitations on executive branch conduct, but then there is little check on how the executive branch lawyers interpret and expands such principles — and all of this focus on legal justification displaces a necessary and deeper policy analysis of the reasons for engaging in armed conflict. In exploring these issues, we also talk about whether legal scholars are fulfilling their role of keeping the government honest in its interpretation of international law, where exactly within the government such decisions get made, and why and how different areas of law get conflated and confused in the justifications for war!

Materials:

– “Legally Sliding Into War,” Just Security, Mar. 15, 2021.

– “International Law as Executive Power,” 57 Harvard Int’l Law J. (2016).

Recommended Reading:

– David Luban, “Complicity and Lesser Evils: A Tale of Two Lawyers,” Georgetown J. Legal Ethics, (forthcoming, 2021).

– Monica Hakimi, “The Jus ad Bellum‘s Regulatory Form,” 112 American J. Int’l L. 151 (2018) [See Episode 6!].

– E. M. Forester, The Machine Stops (1909).

Episode 9 – Oona Hathaway on War Powers and the Scope of National Security

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In this episode, I speak with Oona Hathaway, Professor of Law at Yale Law School and Professor of International Law and Area Studies at the Yale University MacMillan Center. We discuss the constitutional and legislative constraints on the executive war-making power, both in terms of the theoretical rationale for such constraints, and in terms of the constitutional and legislative form such constraints take in U.S. legal system. After discussing how and why such constraints in the U.S. have eroded over time, reaching a nadir in the Libyan intervention, Oona explains how the War Powers Resolution could be revised, in ways more consistent with international law, and how Congress could employ the courts, in order to re-establish Congressional authority over decisions to engage in armed conflict. We also discuss how such crises as the Coronavirus pandemic and climate change should cause us to re-think the scope and character of national security priorities and policy. We wrap up with a short discussion of the collaborative process involved in the writing of her co-authored work The Internationalists, and the ethical obligations in being a government lawyer. A fantastic foray into war powers and evolving perspectives on national security!

Materials:

– “How to Revive Congress’s War Powers,” Texas National Security Review (2019).

– “How to Recover a Role for Congress and the Courts in Decisions to Wage War,” Just Security, Jan. 10, 2020)(with Geoffrey Block).

– “COVID-19 Shows How the U.S. Got National Security Wrong,” Just Security, Apr. 7, 2020.

Reading Recommendations:

– Kate Manne, Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women (2020).

– Samuel Moyn, Humane: How Americans Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, [working title – forthcoming, see this YouTube session for Sam’s discussion of the book!]

– Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall Trilogy (2009)