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Beginning with this nation’s founding and continuing today, courts and political leaders have grappled with difficult questions as to the proper treatment of aliens— those individuals either living here or interacting with the government, but not bearing the title of “U.S. citizen.” In the annual James Madison Lecture, Judge Karen Nelson Moore explores the protections afforded to aliens by our Constitution, tracing those protections and their limitations across the many disparate legal contexts in which questions regarding aliens’ constitutional rights arise. Although the extent to which aliens possess constitutional rights varies with the closeness of their ties to this country, she explains that this single variable cannot account for the many nuances and tensions in federal jurisprudence relating to aliens’ constitutional rights. Closeness, after all, can be measured across multiple dimensions: immigration status, physical proximity to the United States (or to its borders), lawfulness of presence, and allegiance to the country.

Judge Moore first tackles the complicated meaning of alienage, discussing its conceptual definition separately with respect to the text of the Constitution, immigration law, and national security. She then considers the extent to which the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment limits the government’s ability to draw distinctions between different classes of aliens. Possible differential treatment among classes of aliens presents complex constitutional questions that remain unresolved, particularly as those questions relate to the treatment of aliens unlawfully present in this country. The rights of this group are the most in flux: These aliens’ unauthorized presence in the country, combined with their close ties to the political community, makes them difficult to fit into existing legal categories.

The criminal procedure rights of aliens under the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments are also considered, followed by a discussion of aliens’ due process rights with respect to civil litigation, immigration proceedings, and alien-enemy detention. Judge Moore highlights those areas at the outer reaches of current doctrine—the extraterritorial application of constitutional protections and the extent of executive power to combat terrorism. She articulates themes present in constitutional jurisprudence as it relates to aliens, providing a broad-lens view of this vast and complicated area of law.

A federal law known as the Jones Act imposes citizen ownership and control requirements on owners and operators of ships that transport goods between U.S. ports. Scholars have consistently presumed that these requirements are enforceable. This Note demonstrates, however, that limiting foreign ownership in companies with widely dispersed shareholders has become legally and practically infeasible in modern U.S. securities markets. It sheds light for the first time on the Seg-100 program of the Depository Trust Company, which aims to resolve this problem but would ultimately, even with substantial changes, be unable to discern the citizenship of entities that are not natural persons—a vast majority of shareholders. After considering the Jones Act’s ownership and control restrictions in the context of U.S. national security and economic interests, the Note finds that both practical considerations and U.S. interests support elimination of the citizen ownership and control requirements. Recognizing that Congress may be unwilling to invite unrestricted foreign investment in coastwise shipping, it also proposes more limited reforms to foreign ownership limitations and administrative actions that could reduce, but not eliminate, unnecessary costs of the current system.

It has been widely assumed that deterrence has little or no role to play in counterterrorism on the grounds that the threat of punishment is powerless to dissuade ideologically inspired terrorists. But an emerging literature in strategic studies argues, and aspects of contemporary American national security practice confirm, that this account misunderstands the capacity of deterrence to address current threats. In fact, a great deal of American counterterrorisma cluster of refinements to traditional deterrence theory that speaks to a world of asymmetric threats. Yet the emergence of new deterrence has been largely lost on lawyers, judges, and legal academics, resulting in significant gaps between the practice of national security in this area and the legal architecture ostensibly designed to undergird and oversee it. In particular, the legal framework of counterterrorismprecisely the two fields thought to converge in counterterrorism. In this Article, I debut in legal scholarship a sustained analysis of new deterrence and highlight its consequences for national security law, thus ushering in a serious reckoning for jurists with counterterrorism deterrence.

Judicial Review, Liability Rules, and the Habeas Corpus Act of 1863

A national security emergency justifying the elimination of full judicial review and remedies for executive action is often analyzed as an exceptional, distinctive challenge to the rule of law. However, the possibility of irreparable harm frequently supports bypassing judicial procedures in more pedestrian peacetime law, such as an exigent-circumstances exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement or a preliminary injunction to avoid irreparable harm before a trial on the merits. While the scale may be different in national security crises, the problem is the same: how to maintain the rule of law when the traditional procedures and remedial doctrines of a reviewing institution may be ill-suited for avoiding irreparable harm in the time required for judicial review.

This Note uses the immunity provisions of the Habeas Corpus Act of 1863—in which Congress explicitly eliminated legal remedies during the greatest national crisis of American history—to illuminate the broader principles behind the availability of judicial remedies in exigent circumstances. In “routine” exigencies, such as a request for a preliminary injunction or exceptions to the warrant requirement, a shortcut around full procedure for the determination of rights and duties is permitted subject to the availability of judicial review after the intervention, and, often, compensation. The immunity provisions of the Habeas Corpus Act of 1863 cut off both of these remedial functions. Such immunities defeat the compensation purpose of remedies unnecessarily; as remedies in “routine” emergency interventions demonstrate, the compensation and judicial review functions need not always result in deterrence of executive action in a crisis. Immunity provisions such as those in the Act also hinder the development of the law and increase uncertainty for future actors and their possible future victims, even outside emergency situations. This Note argues that the best approach to judicial review in national security crises is not to eliminate remedies entirely, as the Habeas Corpus Act attempted to do, but to “code-switch” from a regime of property rules to a regime of liability rules in order to preserve victim compensation and the rule of law.

A decade of war has meant a decade of writing on war powers. From the authority to start a war, to restrictions on fighting wars, to the authority to end a war, constitutional lawyers and scholars have explored the classic issues (war initiation, prosecution, and termination) through the classic prisms (text, history, and function) for a new generation of national security challenges. Despite the volume of writing on war powers and the urgency of the debates in the context of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, war powers debates are widely seen as stagnant. We introduce a new set of perspectives into the war powers literature. Over the last four decades, behavioral psychologists have identified persistent biases in individual and group decisionmaking. The behavioral revolution has had a significant impact on legal scholarship—primarily in law and economics—and has also influenced scholars in international relations, who increasingly write about psychological biases and other decisionmaking challenges. These insights, however, have yet to be applied in the war powers context. This Article brings the behavioral literature into the conversation on war powers, showing how lessons from behavioral psychology are relevant to decisions on war and peace. It outlines a variety of psychological biases that bear on decisions about war and peace, applies these lessons to a variety of war powers debates, and discusses broader institutional design strategies for debiasing decisionmaking. The lessons of psychology provide new functional perspectives on classic war powers debates: the authority of Congress versus the President to initiate wars, the scope of presidential authority to use force, the ability of Congress to restrict the conduct of war, the War Powers Resolution and the termination of wars, and the role of the United Nations. Some of the decisionmaking biases point in conflicting directions, so there are no simple answers or tidy solutions. But understanding where important decisions risk going wrong is the first step in figuring out how to make them go right.

On his first day in office, President Obama called for the closure of the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Near the end of Obama’s tenure, the prison remains open. This Note suggests a previously undiscussed path for the President to transfer most detainees from Guantánamo, despite congressional opposition, using a robust and exclusive executive tool: the pardon power. By granting conditional pardons to eligible Guantánamo detainees, the President could unilaterally move many to the mainland United States for continued, if limited, detention, and transfer others for repatriation elsewhere. In addressing the Guantánamo problem, this Note argues that pardons have been used and should be viewed as a crucial complement to presidential war powers. The Note concludes that granting clemency for Guantánamo detainees is not only legally defensible, but also consistent with constitutional structure, original understanding, and historical practice since the Founding.

There is a rich literature on the circumstances under which the United Nations Charter or specific Security Council resolutions authorize nations to use force abroad, and there is a rich literature on the circumstances under which the U.S. Constitution and statutory law allow the President to use force abroad. These are largely separate areas of scholarship, addressing what are generally perceived to be distinct legal issues. This Article, by contrast, considers these two bodies of law together as they relate to the United States. In doing so, it makes three main contributions. First, it demonstrates striking parallels between the structure of the international and domestic legal regimes governing the use of force, and it explains how this structure tends to incentivize unilateral action. Second, it theorizes that these two bodies of law are interconnected in previously overlooked ways, such that how the executive branch interprets law in one context can be and often is informed by the other legal context. Third, it documents these interactions over time for several important components of the law on the use of force and shows that this dynamic has played a significant role in justifying the practice-based expansion of unilateral war powers. The Article concludes by arguing that both scholars and policymakers seeking to shape the law on the use of force need to take better account of this interactive dynamic.

The Obama Administration has acted decisively to cure a long-standing wound the United States has inherited from the Cold War by seeking to normalize relations with Cuba. However, prospects for full normalization are currently impeded by over four billion dollars in judgments levied against Cuba by politically motivated state courts in Florida under the state sponsor of terrorism (SST) exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. These judgments create a serious obstacle and impede Cuba and its companies from transferring any assets into the United States. Because these judgments purport to punish Cuba for acts occurring during and immediately after the Cuban Revolution and Cuba was only placed on the SST list in 1982 for supporting insurgent movements elsewhere in Latin America, the courts manifestly exceeded their subject matter jurisdiction in issuing them. Nevertheless, several federal courts have afforded them full faith and credit and begun to enforce them against Cuba’s existing assets in the United States.

This Note therefore argues that the President can and should exercise his power to espouse and settle international claims to resolve these judgments pursuant to a sole executive agreement, whether or not he is able to secure congressional acquiescence for his actions. In doing so, the President can lean on a long record of historical practice affirmed repeatedly by the Supreme Court and buttressed by recent settlements of terrorism claims with Iraq and Libya. Finally, the U.S. government should be able to avoid a takings claim by SST judgment holders after the judgments’ resolution by funneling their claims into the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission and providing for some fractional compensation.