National and International Security

How should societies deal with the aftermath of cataclysmic war and mass atrocities? It’s a question documentary filmmaker Rebecca Richman Cohen ’07 has asked former Nuremberg prosecutors.

Perched on the 21st floor of an office building next to the Statehouse on Boston’s Beacon Hill, Juliette Kayyem ’95 has a spectacular view of the city’s waterfront. But when you’re the person in charge of Massachusetts’ homeland security, that view prompts vigilance more than anything else.

The following op-ed was published in The Boston Globe on December 13, 2006: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the egregious president of Iran, is hosting a conference this week on whether the Holocaust really happened.

International law professor David Kennedy was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam era, but during his early years teaching at Harvard Law School he realized it was time to rethink his position on the valid use of military force.

The news from Baghdad this month tends to make me share Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.’s famous preference for “not so much where we are, but in what direction we are moving.”

The following op-ed by Professor Alan Dershowitz, Arithmetic of Pain, was published in The Wall Street Journal on July 19, 2006: There is no democracy in the world that should tolerate missiles being fired at its cities without taking every reasonable step to stop the attacks. The big question raised by Israel's military actions in Lebanon is what is "reasonable."

Sabin Willett leads a double life as a lawyer. Most days, he works on bankruptcy litigation in the Boston office of Bingham McCutchen. He likes the work. Really, he says, sitting in a conference room with a sweeping view of Boston harbor.

Can a veteran prosecutor whip the Department of Homeland Security into shape? Michael Chertoff '78 has already started.

Nick Brown '02 gained fame as a contestant on the reality show "Survivor." Today his reality is the Green Zone in Baghdad, where he carries a laptop and a rifle as a U.S. Army JAG officer.

Christopher Cox '76 ('77) and Jane Harman '69 sit on different sides of the aisle, but the urgent threat of terrorism unites them.

In a nondescript building in suburban Virginia, two subway stops from the Pentagon, a team of a half dozen or so defense lawyers works on what is perhaps the toughest--and most controversial--legal assignment in America.

Last spring, an Oregon attorney named Brandon Mayfield was arrested by the FBI and jailed for two weeks. He was suspected of being linked to the Madrid train bombings, thanks to the FBI's mistaken match of a fingerprint to a print found on a bag of detonators near the scene.

In his recent book, "The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage," Frederick P. Hitz '64 gives credence to the saying that truth can be stranger than fiction.

It was December 2002 when House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt called Jamie Gorelick '75 to offer her the last Democratic slot on the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.

Professor Philip Heymann '60 and his colleague from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government Juliette Kayyem '95 say Congress should provide much-needed legislation to deal with a number of issues that have emerged in the last three years in the fight against terrorism.

Ever since Professor Philip Heymann '60 began teaching a class on terrorism in the winter of 1988, it's drawn a crowd.

A Harvard Law School professor says a unilateral war on terror will not succeed. His solution: contain and isolate extremists by repairing frayed alliances and finding common ground with mainstream Islam.