Harvard Law School has launched the National Security Law & Policy Initiative, a dedicated effort to bring together scholars, policymakers, practitioners, and students to address some of the most pressing issues in national security. Kristen E. Eichensehr, Balthrop Cassidy Professor of Law, will serve as the initiative’s faculty director.

The initiative will strengthen Harvard Law School’s ability to help shape the future of U.S. national security at this moment of disruption, both in the U.S. constitutional system and in the post-World War II international order. The initiative will support teaching, conferences, and events on these and other topics, with the aims of contributing to public debate and building expertise and pathways for students who seek to practice in the national security realm. Support for this initiative was provided by a philanthropic grant from the Andrew Carnegie Foundation.

“Questions of national security are among the most consequential — and most difficult — that lawyers and policymakers confront,” said John Goldberg, the Morgan and Helen Chu Dean and Professor of Law. “Harvard lawyers have been at the forefront of debates about national security policy and the global order for more than two centuries and our law school is uniquely positioned to bring together scholars, practitioners, public officials, and students to examine those questions with intellectual rigor and from multiple perspectives. The National Security Law & Policy Initiative builds on that tradition while helping prepare the next generation of leaders in the field.”

The new initiative will draw on the expertise of Harvard Law faculty affiliates, including Jack Goldsmith, the Learned Hand Professor of Law, and of a bipartisan advisory board chaired by Hon. Jane Lakes Harman ’69 and composed of former senior government officials whose experience spans all three branches of government, presidential administrations of both parties, the private sector, and academia.

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