The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

From December 28, 2022: In the last few weeks, over a dozen U.S. states have banned TikTok from government devices, citing national security concerns. A similar bill was included in the omnibus spending bill, requiring the social media video app to be removed from the devices used by federal agencies. But addressing the concerns over how the Chinese government could coerce TikTok’s parent company...

From February 14, 2023: Last month's brutal murder of Tyre Nichols by Memphis police has once again sparked a national conversation about the causes of and remedies for persistent police misconduct and abuse. To explore this issue, Jack Goldsmith sat down with Joanna Schwartz, a law professor at UCLA School of Law, who is the author of a new book called, “ Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchab...

In this Scaling Laws Academy "class," Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare , speaks with  Eugene Volokh , a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and long-time professor of law at UCLA, on libel in the AI context. The two dive into Volokh's paper, “ Large Libel Models? Liability for AI Output .”  Extra credit for those who giv...

Since Jan. 20, 84% of U.S. Agency for International Development grants and contracts have been terminated and 93% of agency staff have been fired. On July 1, the State Department absorbed the remaining staff and grants. On  Lawfare Daily ,  Lawfare  Associate Editor for Communications Anna Hickey spoke to New York Times opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof about the global impact of t...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Benjamin Wittes and Eric Ciaramella to talk through the week’s big national security news stories, including: “With Arms Wide Open.” After years of open skepticism toward Ukraine (and uncharacteristic deference to Russia), it seems President Trump may have turned a page. His rhetoric has grown cooler toward Russian President Vladimir Putin, and...

Lawfare Legal Fellow Mykhailo Soldatenko and Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sit down with Markiyan Kliuchkovskyi, Executive Director of the Register of Damage for Ukraine at the Council of Europe and a former legal advisor of the Office of the President of Ukraine, and Patrick W. Pearsall, an international arbitration and disputes partner in the Washington D.C. office of Gibson Dunn...

Alan Rozenshtein, Senior Editor and Research Director at  Lawfare , sits down with David Noll, a Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School, to discuss his new  Lawfare  Research Report, “ Civil Contempt Against a Defiant Executive .” They talk about the widespread assumption that the judiciary is powerless if the executive branch chooses to defy court orders, largely because...

In a  live conversation on  July 11,  Lawfare  Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with  Lawfare  Senior Editors Scott Anderson, Anna Bower and Roger Parloff to discuss the Supreme Court’s ruling in  Trump v. AFGE,  which allows for the mass terminations of federal employees, what happened in the multiple hearings in the criminal and civil cases involvi...

From April 12, 2019: Julian Mortenson, Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, is the author of a remarkable new article entitled "Article II Vests Executive Power, Not the Royal Prerogative," forthcoming in the Columbia Law Review and  available  on SSRN. Recently, Benjamin Wittes spoke with the professor about the article, which Mortenson has been working on for years—as long a...

From April 9, 2024: In the early morning on March 26, a Singapore-flagged cargo ship crashed into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge. The bridge collapsed, resulting in the death of six of the eight individuals conducting maintenance on the bridge. The incident has disrupted commuter traffic and the transport of hazardous materials, and it has halted shipping traffic at the Port of Baltimore, am...

John Keller, now a partner at Walden, Macht, Haran, & Williams, channeled his experience as the former chief of the Public Integrity Section at the Department of Justice to talk about bribery with James Pearce, Lawfare Legal Fellow. After explaining the basics of bribery law and whether a current or former president could face a bribery prosecution, Keller analyzed whether three episodes...

On July 8, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down for a bonus edition of Lawfare Live with Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower and Roger Parloff to discuss Kilmar Abrego Garcia's July 7 hearing in federal court in Greenbelt, Maryland.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ethan Mollick, Professor of Management and author of the “One Useful Thing”  Substack , joins Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare , and Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor at Minnesota Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare , to analyze the latest research in AI adoption, specifically its use by professionals an...

This week, Scott sat down with fellow Senior Editors Molly Reynolds and Alan Rozenshtein to talk through the week’s big national security news, including: “One Bill to rule them all, One Bill to find them, One Bill to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.” Republicans in Congress narrowly enacted President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” last week, just in advance of the July 4 deadline h...

Lawfare Senior Editor Alan Rozenshtein sits down with Ashley Deeks, the Class of 1948 Professor of Scholarly Research in Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, to discuss her new book, “ The Double Black Box: National Security, Artificial Intelligence, and the Struggle for Democratic Accountability .” They talk about the core metaphor of the book: the idea that the use of artif...

Until late May, Michael Feinberg was a senior FBI counterintelligence agent focused on China. All that changed one weekend, when the Deputy FBI Director found out that he was still friends with a former FBI official who had been fired years ago. In his first interview following his essay, “ Goodbye to All That ,” in Lawfare last week. Feinberg sat down with Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes...

Winnona Bernsen, nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative and founder of  DistrictCon , joins  Lawfare Contributing Editor Justin Sherman to discuss her recently released report " Crash (Exploit) and Burn: Securing the Offensive Cyber Supply Chain to Counter China in Cyberspace ." They discuss the offensive cyber industry, the private sector and indiv...

In a live conversation on July 3,  Lawfare  Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with  Lawfare  Legal Fellow James Pearce and  Lawfare  Senior Editors Anna Bower and Roger Parloff to discuss updates in the civil and criminal cases of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a D.C. district court judge's injunction against the Trump administration’s invasion proclamation, attacks on...

From February 16, 2024: The EU has finally agreed to its AI Act. Despite the political agreement reached in December 2023, some nations maintained some reservations about the text, making it uncertain whether there was a final agreement or not. They recently reached an agreement on the technical text, moving the process closer to a successful conclusion. The challenge now will be effective impleme...

From November 7, 2023: You probably already know that Rep. Mike Johnson is the new Speaker of the House. What you may not know is that every single one of the issues on his plate is a national security issue, at least in the short term.  Lawfare  Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with  Lawfare  Senior Editor and Brookings Senior Fellow Molly Reynolds to talk it all throu...

Teun Jansenn is a staff member at the European Parliament who works on issues of EU expansion and support for Ukraine. He joined Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to talk about the prospects of Europe's stepping up for Ukraine as the United States backs away. He also talked about why EU enlargement is essential to getting EU governance under control and the role that Ukraine might play in that proce...

For today's episode,  Lawfare  Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman interviews Lindsay Cohn, an associate professor at the Naval War College and Columbia University, to discuss the Trump administration's handling of the U.S. military. Cohn discusses the firings of senior military officials, military parades, and the use of the U.S. military at the U.S-Mexico border and in Los Angeles....

On today’s episode,  Lawfare  Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Lindsay Freeman, Director of Technology, Law & Policy at the Human Rights Center, UC Berkeley School of Law, to discuss  her recent  Lawfare  article, “War Crimes for Fun and Profit. ” They talk about how and why so-called war influencers linked to private military companies such as the Wag...

In a  live conversation on  June 27,  Lawfare  Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with  Lawfare  Legal Fellow James Pearce and  Lawfare  Senior Editors Anna Bower and Roger Parloff to discuss the Supreme Court’s ruling on nationwide injunctions in the birthright citizenship case, the whistleblower complaint about Emil Bove’s actions as deputy attorney...

From March 19, 2020: What can the president do in a national emergency? What limits what the president can do? What authorizes the president to do all those things he can do in a national emergency? Is the president abusing, misusing, using appropriately, or under-using emergency powers during the coronavirus crisis? And what are the logical end points for how far this could go? For this bonus edi...