The Lawfare Podcast

On today’s episode, Lawfare ’s Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina sits down with Minna Ålander, an associate fellow at Chatham House Europe Programme, and Max Bergmann, the Director of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, to discuss NATO’s historic decision to increase its member state’s defense spending to 5% of their Gross Domestic Produc...

In a  live conversation on  Aug. 1,  Lawfare  Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with  Lawfare  Senior Editors Anna Bower,  Lawfare  Legal Fellow James Pearce, and  Lawfare  contributors Michael Feinberg and Renee DiResta to discuss the politicization of the Justice Department, including the attorney general’s misconduct complaint against Jud...

From June 13, 2024: On today’s episode,  Lawfare  General Counsel and Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Gabor Rona, Professor of Practice at Cardozo Law, and Natalie Orpett,  Lawfare ’s Executive Editor, to discuss  their recent  Lawfare  piece  examining whether a state pursuing an armed conflict in compliance with international humanitarian law coul...

From December 27, 2023: 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 &...

Renée DiResta, an Associate Research Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown and a Contributing Editor at Lawfare , and Alan Rozenshtein, an Associate Professor at Minnesota Law, Research Director at Lawfare , and, with the exception of today, co-host on the Scaling Laws podcast, join Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law an...

For today's episode, Lawfare General Counsel and Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Joel Braunold, Managing Director of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, for another of their regular updates on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This time, they discussed the brutal famine afflicting Gaza, how the broader military conflict between Israel and Hamas has contributed to it,...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Natalie Orpett, Kevin Frazier, and Tyler McBrien to talk through the week’s big national security news stories, including: “Feeding Frenzy.” The crisis in Gaza has reached a new, desperate stage. Months of a near total blockade on humanitarian assistance has created an imminent risk, if not a reality, of mass starvation among Gazan civilians. A...

Candace Rondeaux, Senior Director of New America’s Future Frontlines program, Director of its Planetary Politics initiative, and professor of practice at Arizona State University joins  Lawfare ’s Justin Sherman to discuss her recently published book, " Putin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse into Mercenary Chaos ." They discuss Yevgeny Prigozhin and his founding of...

Alan Rozenshtein, Senior Editor and Research Director at Lawfare , sits down with Sezaneh Seymour, Vice President and head of regulatory risk and policy at Coalition and a former Senior Adviser on the National Security Council staff, and Brandon Wales, Vice President for cybersecurity strategy at SentinelOne and the former Executive Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency...

In a  live conversation on  July 25,  Lawfare  Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with  Lawfare  Senior Editors Scott Anderson and Roger Parloff and  Lawfare  Legal Fellow James Pearce to discuss the the Supreme Court’s rulings allowing the removal of executive officials of independent agencies, the ongoing dismantling of executive agencies like the Vo...

From May 6, 2017: Three months into the Trump presidency, where does the relationship between the president and the intelligence community stand? Donald Trump is no longer quite so regularly combative in his tweets and public comments about the various intelligence agencies, but the White House-intelligence community relationship is still far from normal under this very unusual presidency. Here to...

From July 23, 2024: Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota Law School and Senior Editor at  Lawfare , and Matt Perault, the Director of the Center on Technology Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, sat down with Alexander Macgillivray, known to all as "amac," who was the former Principle Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the United States i...

Janet Egan, Senior Fellow with the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security; Jessica Brandt, Senior Fellow for Technology and National Security at the Council on Foreign Relations; Neil Chilson, Head of AI Policy at Abundance Institute; and Tim Fist, Director of Emerging Technology Policy at the Institute for Progress join Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation...

For today's episode, Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson is sharing more of the conversations he had with leading policy experts and practitioners on the margins of this year's Aspen Security Forum, which took place last week.  First, he is joined by Ali Nazary, the head of foreign relations for the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan, to discuss the Front's position nearly four years after...

For today's episode,  Lawfare  Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson shares some of the conversations he had with leading policy experts and practitioners on the margins of this year's Aspen Security Forum, which took place last week.  First he sat down Shashank Joshi, the Defence Editor for The Economist to discuss the new dynamics surrounding European security, as well as the path towar...

Alan Rozenshtein, Senior Editor at Lawfare and Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota, speaks with Noah Feldman, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, about the Supreme Court's  recent decision  to greatly limit the practice of universal injunctions. The ruling came in a case involving a Trump administration executive order on birthright citizen...

Scott recorded this week’s special episode live from the 2025 Aspen Security Forum , where he sat down with a panel of top national security journalists—including co-host emeritus Shane Harris of The Atlantic, Mark Goldberg of the Global Dispatches podcast, and Alex Ward of the Wall Street Journal—to talk about some of the issues that have emerged at and around this year’s Forum, including: “Putti...

In a  live conversation on  July 18,  Lawfare  Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with  Lawfare  Senior Editors Anna Bower and Roger Parloff and  Lawfare  Contributor Nicholas Bednar to discuss the Supreme Court’s rulings in  Trump v. AFGE  and  McMahon v. New York,  which allows for the mass terminations of federal employees, what...

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...