The Lawfare Podcast

From October 8, 2016: Stephanie Leutert, the Mexico Security Initiative Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of  Lawfare 's  "Beyond the Border" series , joined Benjamin Wittes on this week's podcast to talk about the epidemic of violence plaguing Mexico and Central America. Despite the brutality, extremity, and remarkable scale of the violence going on immediately...

From February 27, 2025: For today’s episode,  Lawfare  Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Kathleen Claussen, an expert in international economic law and professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, and  Lawfare  Contributing Editor Peter Harrell, a non-resident senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, to discuss the ambitious set of tari...

Lee Kovarsky, an endowed chair professor at the University of Texas School of Law, speaks with Senior Editor Roger Parloff about patronage pardons, the subject of his forthcoming article in the Duke Law Journal. Patronage pardons are pardons a president issues to reward and possibly even induce criminality by political supporters. Kovarsky discusses whether the founders anticipated such pardons, g...

In a Feb. 26 Lawfare Live , Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes and Lawfare Senior Editor Anna Bower discussed the evidentiary hearing in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia criminal case which focused on the motion to dismiss for vindictive prosecution.  This episode is a part of Lawfare’s new livestream series, Lawfare Live: The Now. Subscribe to Lawfare on Substack or YouTube to receive an alert...

This week, Scott was joined by Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien, Lawfare Senior Editor Molly Roberts, and University of Virginia Professor of Law Paul Stephan to talk through the week’s big news in national security, including: “Textual Healing.” On Friday, a 6-3 Supreme Court majority brought an end to at least the current iteration of President Trump’s controversial tariff policies, ruling...

Loren Voss, Public Service Fellow at Lawfare , sits down with Stuart Casey Maslen, the head of the IHL in Focus project at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights. They discuss the Geneva Academy's “ IHL in Focus Report ” covering all the major armed conflicts around the world, the role of new technology such as drones, the threats to IHL compliance and accountability...

Lawfare Public Service Fellow Ariane Tabatabai and Eric Brewer of the Nuclear Threat Initiative join Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes in a discussion of the possibly impending U.S. strike on Iran. Is the United States about to go to war? If so, over what? And with what objectives? Does this relate primarily to Iran's residual nuclear program or the Iranian regime's recent massacres of prote...

Senior Editor Michael Feinberg is joined by Jason Burke of The Guardian, the author of “ The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists who Hijacked the 1970s .” The two discuss the roots of European and Middle Eastern terrorist organizations from that decade, as well as the response of governments to their attacks and the lingering hold that the milieu still maintains on popular culture. To...

In a live conversation on YouTube , Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Eric Columbus, Roger Parloff, and Anna Bower, Lawfare Public Service Fellow Troy Edwards, and Lawfare Contributor Peter Harrell to discuss the Supreme Court’s ruling overturning President Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs, a federal judge holding a government attorney in contempt, Ful...

From January 28, 2025: In today’s episode,  Lawfare  Senior Editor Alan Z. Rozenshtein speaks with his University of Minnesota Law colleague, Nick Bednar, about the wave of Day 1 executive orders affecting the civil service. Bednar recently analyzed these orders in a  piece for  Lawfare . They discuss what the orders say, how they might be challenged in court, and what this mea...

From February 13, 2025: Only a few weeks have passed since inauguration, but President Trump's barrage of executive orders has already generated  dozens of legal challenges . Which raises the question: are the courts up to the job? Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with Benjamin Wittes,  Lawfare 's Editor-in-Chief, to discuss his recent article, “ Are the Courts Up to the Sit...

Alan Rozenshtein, research director at Lawfare , and Kevin Frazier, senior editor at Lawfare , speak with Amanda Askell, head of personality alignment at Anthropic, about  Claude's Constitution , a 20,000-word document that describes the values, character, and ethical framework of Anthropic's flagship AI model and plays a direct role in its training. The conversation covers how the constituti...

This week, Scott sat down with his foreign-policy-minded colleagues Daniel Byman, Michael Feinberg, and Ari Tabatabai to talk through some recent big news stories around the world, including: “Beer Hall Push-back.” Over the weekend, a raft of bipartisan U.S. and European officials headed to Bavaria for the annual Munich Security Conference. Last year, Vice President J.D. Vance gave a barnburner of...

The dramatic influx of immigration enforcement actions in Minnesota have landed an enormous number of people in detention. It's led to an unprecedented number of petitions for habeas corpus—that is, people arguing that their detention is unlawful. On today's podcast,  Lawfare 's Executive Editor Natalie Orpett talked with John Albanese, an attorney at the law firm Berger Montague in Minneapol...

Lawfare Book Review Editor Jonathan Cedarbaum sits down with Justin Sherman, the CEO of Global Cyber Strategies, to discuss his new book, " Navigating Technology and National Security: The Intersection of CFIUS, Team Telecom, AI Controls, and Other Regulations ," in which Sherman describes and assesses the proliferation of U.S. regulatory programs designed to guard against national security risks...

Eric Ciaramella of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Francis Farrell, a reporter at the Kyiv Independent who covers military and security dynamics in Ukraine, join Lawfare ’s Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina for a look back at the first year of the Trump presidency through the lens of the war Ukraine.  The three delve into the expectations surrounding the Trump administrati...

In a live conversation on YouTube , Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Eric Columbus, Roger Parloff, and Anna Bower, Lawfare Public Service Fellow Troy Edwards, and Lawfare Student Contributor Peyton Baker to discuss the arraignment of Don Lemon and his co-defendants in Minnesota, affidavits released for the FBI search of Fulton County, the Justice Departm...

From February 12, 2025: Jack Goldsmith, the Learned Hand Professor at Harvard Law School and co-founder of  Lawfare , joins Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota and Senior Editor at  Lawfare , to talk about his  recent  Lawfare  article  discussing last year's Supreme Court decision in  Trump v. United States  and its i...

From February 7, 2025: On today’s podcast,  Lawfare  Associate Editor for Communications Anna Hickey spoke to Nayna Gupta, Director of Policy at the American Immigration Council, about the Laken Riley Act, the first piece of legislation signed by President Trump in his second term, its start as a messaging bill in the last Congress, and its impact on the immigration detention system. To...

For today's podcast, we're bringing you the audio for a panel discussion that Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson hosted this past November, at a conference on Precision Lethality and Civilian Harm Mitigation, hosted by the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law (CERL) at the University of Pennsylvania. Joining him on the panel were Professor Claire Finkelstein, CERL's founder and director; Christopher...

This week, Scott sat down with Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes, who recently returned from Ukraine, and Lawfare ’s Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina, to go through the latest developments in that country, including: “Cold War.” Russia’s ongoing winter campaign against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure has created a humanitarian crisis in many parts of the country. In Kyiv, at least one major power...

Alan Rozenshtein, research director at Lawfare , speaks with Justin Curl, a third-year J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School, and Arvind Narayanan, professor of computer science at Princeton University and director of the Center for Information Technology Policy, about their new Lawfare research report, “ AI Won't Automatically Make Legal Services Cheaper ,” co-authored with Princeton Ph. D. candid...

In  his recent piece for Court Watch , a news site covering interesting, yet often overlooked federal court filings, Lawfare Associate Editor Peter Beck wrote about the Middle District of Georgia, which is “filled with rich news stories that even a few years ago would have been quickly reported” but which “now sits in a so-called ‘news desert,’ a place that is largely devoid of even a single...

Lawfare Senior Editor Eric Columbus talks with Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council to discuss what is—and isn’t—likely to look different in the upcoming year of Trump administration immigration policy. After a whirlwind year, ICE and CBP have a lot more resources than at the dawn of the administration—but also a lot more opposition. How will it all shake out?  To r...

In a live conversation on YouTube , Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Eric Columbus, Roger Parloff, and Molly Roberts to discuss a congressional hearing into ICE’s use of force in Minneapolis and Chicago, oral argument over DHS’s mandatory detention policy, a district judge rejecting Minnesota’s 10th amendment challenge to Operation Metro Surge, and more....