Office of Legal Counsel (OLC)
68 Articles
After the NDAA Veto: Now What?
This time, he’s serious. After all these years of unexecuted veto threats, on October 22, 2015, President Obama finally vetoed the $612 billion National Defense and Authorization…
CIA and OLC Must Release More “Secret” Documents on Aulaqi Drone Strike
On Thursday, a federal district court in New York issued its latest ruling in the ACLU’s long-running Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation seeking the legal and factual…
There’s No Reason to Hide the Amount of Secret Law
Last week, President Obama announced a new policy that would allow private parties to pay ransoms to hostage takers. The policy was established through an executive order and an…
Guest Post: Torture is Still on the Table
The recent Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA interrogations is a parade of horribles. Detainees by the dozen arrested wrongfully and later released, including innocent…
Why the immigration initiative has nothing to do with assertions of executive constitutional power
My quick take here, dispelling some of the more common misunderstandings about the legal bases of the Executive’s new immigration policies.
Key Government Legal Offices Need Permanent Leadership
The Obama administration is confronting a range of foreign crises. Options for responding will continue to present difficult questions of both domestic and international law. And…
New Court Orders Signal More Drone Documents Are on the Way
For more than four years of Freedom of Information Act litigation concerning the government’s targeted-killing program, the government managed to avoid releasing a single document…
You Can’t Have an “Associated Force” with No Core
There has been lots of commentary already on the newly-released (but heavily-redacted) OLC opinion, so I’ll focus mine on a key point I haven’t yet seen made. The OLC memo…
The OLC’s Drone Memo and International Law’s Ascendance
The long-awaited release of the redacted July 16, 2010 OLC memo is anticlimactic in important respects. Much is still unknown to the point that it is difficult, if not impossible,…
On the Benefits of Transparency: Why So Long to Disclose Drone Memo?
Monday’s release of the previously secret July 2010 Justice Department memo laying out the legal case for killing US citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, has sparked a wide range of reactions,…
Reflections on What the Drone Memo Does and Doesn’t Say
There is already a lot of commentary on the OLC drone memo, and likely more to come. Here, I just want to highlight three key issues that should be part of the mix: #1: Issues…
The Constitutional Question the Drone Memo Didn’t—and Couldn’t—Answer
Yesterday’s release of the Office of Legal Counsel’s “drone memo” (which, at some point, we should stop referring to in the singular) has provoked an understandable…