The Lawfare Podcast

From August 14, 2024: Over the past week, Ukrainian forces have launched a major incursion into Russia proper, occupying 1,000 square kilometers in Kursk Oblast, which borders Ukraine. The operation, which caught both Russia and the United States by surprise, is the first major Ukrainian offensive in more than a year. In this episode, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sits down with Lawfare's Ukraine Fellow Ana...

In this episode of Scaling Laws, Dean Ball, Senior Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and former Senior Policy Advisor for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, joins Kevin Frazier, 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 Research D...

On today’s episode, Lawfare’s Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina sits down with a member of the Ukrainian parliament, Anastasiia Radina, to discuss the Ukrainian government’s attack on the country’s independent anti-corruption agencies, which sparked the first country-wide protests since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

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This week, a rejuvenated Scott returned from vacation to sit down with his Lawfare colleagues Benjamin Wittes, Daniel Byman, and Kate Klonick to talk through some of the week’s big national security news, including:

• “Occupational Hazards.” The Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stated its intent to occupy Gaza City, the last segment of Gaza not under Israeli military control, and displace its civilia...

In their new book, “Command of Commerce: America’s Enduring Economic Power Advantage Over China,” Steve Brooks and Ben Vagle argue that the United States’ economic advantage over China is much larger than is commonly believed. They contend that if the United States were to cut China off from the U.S. economy and from the economies of U.S. allies, China would suffer significantly more than the United States. 

Matt Gluck, Executi...

On today’s episode, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Seth Harp, an investigative reporter, U.S. Army Reserve veteran, and a former Assistant Attorney General for the state of Texas to discuss Harp’s new book, “The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces.” 

They discuss Harp’s experiences reporting on the murder of two special forces operators at Fort Bragg—one of w...

In a live conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower and Roger Parloff, and Lawfare contributor Peter Harrell to discuss the D.C. Circuit vacating Judge Boasberg’s probable cause of contempt by the Trump administration, where the legal challenges to President Trump’s IEEPA tariffs stand, and the legal battle unfol...

From August 6, 2024: A new film from Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines series called “The Night Won’t End” profiles three Palestinian families as they try to survive the war in Gaza.

On today’s episode, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien speaks to the documentary’s director, Kavitha Chekuru, along with a few of the journalists and researchers who came together to work on the project, including Emily Tripp, Director at ...

From June 7, 2023: On January 1, 2023, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was sworn in as president of Brazil. A week later, insurrectionists in Brazil stormed government buildings, including the president’s palace, the Supreme Federal Court, and the National Congress building to violently disrupt the democratic transition of power and challenge the results of the election. Lula, however, remained undeterred and forged ahead. 

It’s been...

Brian Fuller, a member of the Product Policy Team at OpenAI, joins Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to analyze how large AI labs go about testing their models for compliance with internal requirements and various legal obligations. They also cover the ins and outs of what it means to work in product policy and what issues are front of mind for i...

Sam Bresnick, Research Fellow and Andrew W. Marshall Fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), joins Lawfare’s Justin Sherman to discuss his recently published report, “Big Tech in Taiwan: Beyond Semiconductors.” They discuss a previous report Sam coauthored with Georgetown CSET colleagues, “Which Ties Will Bind?,” looking at U.S. Big Tech companies’ exposure to China; Sam’s rece...

Lawfare Legal Fellow Mykhailo Soldatenko sits down with Oona Hathaway, Yale Law Professor and President-elect of the American Society of International Law, to discuss how the current world events are harming the norm prohibiting the use of force in international relations, why that's troubling, and what to do about it. They chat about the current U.S. administration's policies, recent strikes on Iran, and the implications for the n...

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 Product. 

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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 Judge Boasberg, the legal challenges to Alina Ha...

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 could nonetheless violate the Genocide Conventi...

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 & Pistol Association v. Bruen. In t...

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 and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to take...

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, and what the rising global pressure ...

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. And it finally has the world—incl...