Articles
“Violent, Vicious, and Fast”: LSCO Lawyering and the Transformation of American IHL
By Naz Khatoon Modirzadeh
In this Article, I examine a phenomenon unfolding within the United States’s military legal establishment: an effort by a segment of military lawyers to define how the law of armed conflict (LOAC) applies to the wars they anticipate fighting in the future. I refer to this effort as LSCO lawyering: the development, advancement, and institutionalization of a vision of LOAC tailored to large-scale combat operations (LSCOs), understood here as multi-domain warfare against a peer adversary such as China. Drawing on doctrinal materials, planning documents, and conversations with current and former armed-forces legal advisers from the United States and allied or partner forces, I trace how LSCO lawyering reflects a diagnosis of interpretive and institutional crisis—a perceived mismatch between prevailing legal expectations and the operational realities of high-intensity war—and a response that aims not to dismantle LOAC but to reassert it on terms viewed as credible and feasible under conditions of existential conflict.
At the heart of this project lies a reconfiguration of what I call American international humanitarian law (IHL): the United States’s distinctive assemblage of legal interpretations, operational practices, and normative commitments that shape its approach to the conduct of hostilities. While LSCO lawyering is often framed internally as a modest clarification of existing law, I suggest that it functions as a far-reaching attempt to reshape the interpretive ecosystem within which LOAC is applied by privileging internal coherence, institutional discretion, and operational speed over policy overlays, external scrutiny, and extensive civilian-protection norms. The LSCO lawyering project does not reject the law, but it does aim to narrow its aperture to ensure that legal interpretation does not require, in the view of its proponents, normatively undue or operationally unsustainable limits on commanders preparing to fight—violent, vicious, and fast—in a potentially existential war, which would entail extraordinarily high consequences for civilian death and destruction.
The emergence of LSCO lawyering sheds light on deeper conditions within the law of armed conflict’s normative and interpretive architecture. It brings to the surface long-standing tensions—between operational feasibility and civilian protection, between internal judgment and external review, between doctrinal minimalism and progressive development—that have shaped the field for decades. As a project grounded in anticipatory planning, LSCO lawyering highlights the degree to which LOAC interpretation is shaped not only by treaty text or customary practice but also by institutional culture, professional memory, and perceived strategic necessity. In that sense, it offers a revealing case through which to examine the evolving contours of LOAC as a legal, operational, and epistemic system—one whose boundaries are still being contested and whose authority remains under active construction.
Techno-Federalism: How Regulatory Fragmentation Shapes the U.S.-China AI Race
By Jason Jia-Xi Wu
The United States and China are engaged in a regulatory arms race over artificial intelligence (AI). Yet, existing debates often overlook a critical factor shaping this AI race: federalism, or the division of regulatory authority between central and local governments. In the United States, states lead in AI regulation, with the federal government taking a limited, backseat role. In China, although authority remains more centralized, local governments have played a pivotal role in implementing and experimenting with AI policies. While institutional differences remain, both countries exhibit signs of partial convergence towards a fragmentary approach to AI governance.
What explains this convergence? The Article argues that the answer lies in industry self-governance. In both countries, the tech industry is increasingly acting as a co-regulator of AI systems alongside traditional central and local authorities. As gatekeepers, suppliers, and beneficiaries of disruptive AI technologies, the tech industry imposes market discipline on regulators at both levels, often by leveraging local protectionism and jurisdictional variation to advance its interests. However, as national security takes center stage in this AI race, the tech industry is assuming both commercial and geopolitical roles, emerging as a third regulatory force that reshapes center-local relations.
This new paradigm reflects what this Article terms “techno-federalism.” Blending “technocracy” with “federalism,” techno-federalism captures how emerging AI norms both disrupt and transform center-local relations by empowering the private sector to embed itself in public policymaking. It challenges the dominant view that the U.S.-China AI race is merely a “battle of values” between liberal democracy and techno-autocracy. By highlighting the tripartite interplay between central, local, and market power, techno-federalism offers a more nuanced perspective, addressing the limits of conventional geostrategic approaches to the U.S.-China AI race.
By Dan Maurer
This article describes the legal confusion that surfaces when a senior military commander dissents from, disobeys, or more offensively defies an apparently lawful order from the commander-in-chief to use force in ways that might check, curb, frustrate, or violate the constitutional liberties of the domestic public. Relying on both hypothetical and historical examples in which the constitutional values of civilian control of the armed forces and domestic civil rights collide, this article suggests that routine reliance on traditional civil-military relations theory and the military’s own criminal law only sets the stage for the potential conflict and fails to provide a map that detours around hazards or would soften a future collision. I locate the cause of the collision’s damage to be weakly-secured intersection of military professionalism norms, ambiguous constitutional text, and federal statutes that say more about the roles of the senior military elites than about the working dynamics of the relationship they live in with their civilian political superiors (and nothing relevant at all about those civilian superiors). The article presents novel, if broad, interpretations of some of those statutes (like the Uniform Code of Military Justice) to conclude that only a legislated safe harbor provision (properly tuned to accommodate professional norms, relevant military criminal law, and the values of civilian control over the military and values protected by the Bill of Rights) can serve the necessary two functions. It must act simultaneously as, first, a sufficient check on presidential discretion and, second, offer sufficient guidance and norm-reinforcing protocols to the professional military in ways that deter or moderate such confrontational constitutional collisions of values.