Colloquium on Law and Security

Professor Stephen Holmes
Professor David Golove

Fall 2019
Thursdays, 3:00–4:50 p.m.

Vanderbilt Hall, Room 208

LAW-LW.11168.001
2 credits

This colloquium will deal with a broad range of national security issues. Following 9/11, the national security landscape was largely defined by the still continuing war against terrorism, which gave rise not only to conflicts on several continents with non-state actors (e.g., al Qaeda and ISIS), but also to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. More recently, new kinds of national security dilemmas have increasingly taken center stage: Great power competition between the United States and China and the United States and Russia; the prospect and reality of nuclear proliferation on the Korean peninsula and in the Middle East; the emergence of increasingly sophisticated, and the widespread availability of, cyber weapons; and the much discussed breakdown of the liberal international legal order, characterized by intensifying threats to global institutions like the European Union, the World Trade Organization, the NATO Alliance, as well as to democracy itself from the rise of so-called populist parties. The international, constitutional and administrative law issues this new landscape implicates are legion, and we will be considering a variety of them in the papers and other writings that visiting experts will present each week in this Colloquium. The Colloquium aims to foster productive discussion on these issues between legal academics, serious journalists and historians, and government officials with practical experience.