In this Scaling Laws Academy "class," Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, speaks with Eugene Volokh, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and long-time professor of law at UCLA, on libel in the AI context. The two dive into Volokh's paper, “Large Libel Models? Liability for AI Output.”

• Extra credit for those who give it a full read and explore some of the "homework" below:
• “Beyond Section 230: Principles for AI Governance,” 138 Harv. L. Rev. 1657 (2025)
• “When Artificial Agents Lie, Defame, and Defraud, Who Is to Blame?,” Stanford HAI (2021)

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Since Jan. 20, 84% of U.S. Agency for International Development grants and contracts have been terminated and 93% of agency staff have been fired. On July 1, the State Department absorbed the remaining staff and grants. On Lawfare Daily, Lawfare Associate Editor for Communications Anna Hickey spoke to New York Times opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof about the global impact of the Trump administration's dismantling of the USAID and foreign assistance cuts. They discussed what Kristof saw in his reporting trips to Liberia, Sierra Leone, Kenya, and South Sudan, and how the cuts to foreign assistance put U.S. national security at risk.

Please note that this episode contains content that some people may find disturbing. Listener discretion is advised.

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This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Benjamin Wittes and Eric Ciaramella to talk through the week’s big national security news stories, including:

• “With Arms Wide Open.” After years of open skepticism toward Ukraine (and uncharacteristic deference to Russia), it seems President Trump may have turned a page. His rhetoric has grown cooler toward Russian President Vladimir Putin, and he has proven more willing to provide arms to Ukraine, even over contrary efforts by some of his advisers—including an agreement to provide Ukraine with Patriot missiles and other U.S.-made, Europe-funded weapons. What explains this switch? And how durable is it likely to prove?
• “Hitting Foggy Bottom.” Just days after the Supreme Court removed a preliminary injunction, the State Department went forward with substantial personnel cuts, RIFing 1,350 foreign and civil service personnel in Washington, D.C. It’s all part of a much broader reorganization that State Department leadership claims will make the Department leaner or more efficient, even as it guts personnel working on issues disfavored by the Trump administration.
• “Waiting for the Intel Impressment.” Since the Trump administration’s June 21 airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, a heated debate has raged over their effects. The administration maintains the strikes were “historically successful” and permanently set back the Iranian nuclear program. But media reports source to people within the intelligence community have suggested a much more limited effect. How should we weigh these competing claims? And when will we know the truth?

In object lessons, Ben asks for your public service in supporting Lawfare’s Public Service Fellowship. Scott pulled a Quinta with his recommendation of the New Yorker essay “Zohran Mamdani and Mahmoud Khalil Are in on the Joke,” by Hanif Abdurraquib. And Eric makes his summer travels epic by listening to the podcast, The Rest is History.

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Lawfare Legal Fellow Mykhailo Soldatenko and Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sit down with Markiyan Kliuchkovskyi, Executive Director of the Register of Damage for Ukraine at the Council of Europe and a former legal advisor of the Office of the President of Ukraine, and Patrick Pearsall, Partner at Gibson Dunn and Director of the Columbia Law School International Claims and Reparations Project. Markiyan and Patrick played a key role in proposing and designing Ukraine's reparations strategy soon after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. They discuss how they came up with the idea and pitched it to President Zelensky, the G-7, and the UN General Assembly; the proposed reparations mechanism; the fate of frozen Russian assets; and the relevance of the reparations to the Ukraine-Russia talks.

You may want to look at the following materials relevant to the discussion.

• UN General Assembly Resolution on "Furtherance of remedy and reparation for aggression against Ukraine"
• Chiara Giorgetti, Markiyan Kliuchkovsky, Patrick Pearsall, and Jeremy K. Sharpe, “Historic UNGA Resolution Calls for Ukraine Reparations”
• Scott R. Anderson, “Understanding the G7’s New Plan for Funding Ukraine”

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Alan Rozenshtein, Senior Editor and Research Director at Lawfare, sits down with David Noll, a Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School, to discuss his new Lawfare Research Report, “Civil Contempt Against a Defiant Executive.” They talk about the widespread assumption that the judiciary is powerless if the executive branch chooses to defy court orders, largely because enforcement mechanisms like the U.S. Marshals Service reside within the executive branch.

Noll argues that this view is mistaken and overlooks the significant enforcement powers the courts possess that are independent of the executive. Noll and Rozenshtein discuss non-custodial sanctions like stripping officials of immunity, levying substantial personal fines, and imposing professional discipline. They also explore the arrest power, noting that the U.S. Marshals have a statutory duty to enforce all lawful court orders that may supersede a presidential directive, and that courts retain a historical power to appoint their own deputies to enforce contempt citations if the Marshals were to refuse. Noll concludes that a conflict between the branches would likely be more protracted and contested than is commonly believed.

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From April 12, 2019: Julian Mortenson, Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, is the author of a remarkable new article entitled "Article II Vests Executive Power, Not the Royal Prerogative," forthcoming in the Columbia Law Review and available on SSRN.

Recently, Benjamin Wittes spoke with the professor about the article, which Mortenson has been working on for years—as long as the two have known each other. The article explores the history of exactly three words of the U.S. Constitution—the first three words of Article II, to be precise: "the executive power."

Huge claims about presidential power have rested on a conventional understanding of these three words. Julian argues that this conventional understanding is not just partially wrong, or mostly wrong, but completely wrong, as a matter of history. And, he tries to supplant it with a new understanding that he argues is actually a very old understanding of what those words mean.

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From April 9, 2024: In the early morning on March 26, a Singapore-flagged cargo ship crashed into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge. The bridge collapsed, resulting in the death of six of the eight individuals conducting maintenance on the bridge. The incident has disrupted commuter traffic and the transport of hazardous materials, and it has halted shipping traffic at the Port of Baltimore, among other effects.

Lawfare Research Fellow Matt Gluck discussed the bridge’s collapse, how authorities responded to it, and what it all means for the resilience of U.S. critical infrastructure and the state of crisis response with Juliette Kayyem, a professor of international security at the Harvard Kennedy School—who recently wrote a book on disaster management. Was the bridge adequately protected? How should governments and the private sector prepare to both prevent crises, but perhaps more importantly, prepare for the aftermath when they inevitably occur?

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