The Center’s flagship speaker series continues to host more speakers each year, drawing world-renowned scholars, legal experts, and policy practitioners to the UT campus. This semester we welcomed seven experts to the 40-acres to share their research on topics as diverse as drone strikes, 18th century warfare, the 1970s, and declassification of government documents. Below you’ll find a sampling of some of these events. Stay tuned for the Spring 2014 lineup!

“The Constitutional Power to Threaten War” with Professor Matthew Waxman, Professor of Law at Columbia Law School.

Professor Waxman argued that the analysis of the allocation of war powers by legal scholars fails to fully capture the actual execution of these powers, resulting in a disconnect between scholarship and practice. According to Waxman, legal scholars tend to focus on declarations of war and actual military engagements when analyzing war powers. This focus fails to capture the importance of the issuance of threats to prevent or deter events and thus ignores a significant component of U.S. grand strategy. He expanded on these themes in a video interview, shown below:

Drones and Democratic Accountability” with Dr. Sarah Kreps, Assistant Professor of Government at Cornell University and a 2013-2014 Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Dr. Kreps discussed how the use of drones affects democratic accountability and how the marketplace of ideas shapes the drone debate. Her presentation was part of her forthcoming book, Drone Warfare. During her talk, Kreps argued that with respect to the use of drones, the marketplace of ideas (a rationale for freedom of expression) has not acted in the service of free debate. On the contrary, the ideological space in which discussion on the use of drones takes place is quite constrained. Although in theory the marketplace of ideas should allow the public to wrestle with ideas and present arguments on both sides of the debate, on the subject of drone warfare the media has remained silent or tacitly supportive of the government’s approach.

“The Verdict of Battle” with Dr. James Whitman, Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School.

Dr. Whitman presented the central claims from his book, The Verdict of Battle ““ namely that pitched wars in the eighteenth century were more civilized than those of previous and following centuries. Combatants of the time considered pitched battles to be a legitimate standard operating procedure by which to settle disputes. Sovereigns agreed to a tacit contract of trial by combat and accepted the verdict and consequences of triumph or defeat on the battlefield. By resorting to this conflict resolution mechanism, warring parties limited the duration and location of war. He sat down with us before his presentation to talk about these ideas in greater depth:

“Decoding Official Secrecy: Computational Analysis of Hundreds of Thousands of Declassified Documents” with Dr. Matthew Connelly, Professor of History at Columbia University.

Dr. Connelly spoke about his current project, the Declassification Engine. The project is a collaborative effort between historians, data scientists, and other stakeholders, and attempts to use data analytics to produce new tools to address, process, and analyze the growing corpus of official secrets. Connelly further discusses the project in a brief video interview, below:

Thank you to all of our speakers for a successful semester of events! For more information on upcoming events at the Strauss Center, view the Events page on our website.