Strauss Center Distinguished Scholar Bobby Chesney was mentioned in an Op-Ed by the Washington Post editorial board on May 15th discussing the Obama Administration’s drone policy. In the article, the Washington Posts expresses its support for a new effort by the Senate Armed Services Committee to look into revising the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF). The Washington Post mentions that this action is strongly supported by a group of legal scholars, including the Strauss Center’s Bobby Chesney.

Professor Chesney is one of a group of legal experts calling on Congress to make amendments to the AUMF. The law was created in 2001 following the 9-11 attacks as a means of legal justification for retaliatory action against those entities responsible for the terror attacks. More recently, the AUMF has been used to justify drone strikes in Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan. As the law was written in response to the September 11th attacks, Professor Chesney and others have argued that it is becoming increasingly obsolete, and that a new legal foundation for responding to terrorist threats worldwide must be established.

You can read the op-ed in its entirety here. If you are interested in learning more about the proposals put forward by Bobby Chesney, Jack Goldsmith of Harvard, Matthew Waxman of Columbia, and Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution, you can read their paper put out by the Hoover Institution, here.