Last month, UT Law Professor and Incoming Director of the Strauss Center Bobby Chesney participated in a conference at Columbia Law School and spoke at a colloquium at NYU Law where he discussed various aspects of the laws of war.

On November 21, Professor Chesney participated in a conference at Columbia Law School entitled, From Gettysburg to Guantanamo: 150 Years of the Lieber Code and the Law of Armed Conflict. The event celebrated the 150th anniversary of the Lieber Code, the world’s first attempt to codify the laws of war written by Columbia University Professor Francis Lieber and signed by President Lincoln in 1863. Chesney spoke as part of a panel entitled, “The Liber Code & the American Civil War.” The event was hosted by Columbia Law School with support from the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, the Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute, the Roger Hertog Program on Law and National Security, and The Lieber Society of the American Society of International Law.

Professor Chesney also spoke at the NYU Law School’s Hauser Colloquium, which focuses on the intersection between international law and politics and explores the tension between the two. His talk, “War Powers without War?”, discussed the use of lethal force in the context of the armed-conflict and postwar legal models, and largely centered on the arguments included in his forthcoming article in the Harvard National Security Journal, Postwar.