Harvard Law School Launches National Security Law & Policy Initiative

Harvard Law School launched the National Security Law & Policy Initiative on Wednesday, a new program combining a series of talks, conferences, and classes aimed at engaging with pressing questions surrounding U.S. national security.

The initiative will be directed by HLS professor Kristen E. Eichensehr ’04, an expert in foreign relations and national security law who joined the school’s faculty last fall. Its formation comes just days before the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

“I was actually an undergrad here at that time. I remember walking to Sever to do class registration on the morning of 9/11 before the news broke, and so that very much framed my experience of college and my early years in national security,” Eichensehr said in an interview. “But my sense now is that there’s been a lot of water under the bridge since 9/11, and we are at a fundamentally different point.”

Eichensehr pointed to a statement from Canadian Prime Minister Mark J. Carney ’87 at the World Economic Forum in January that the international system is “in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” amid new questions surrounding international law, global institutions, and war powers.

“We are at an inflection point internationally, and what the United States chooses to do domestically on national security has huge consequences — not just for those in the United States and for our domestic legal system — but internationally for folks all around the world, for other states, and for the so-called international legal order or or disorder, as as the case may be,” she added.

The initiative, supported by a $700,000 two-year grant from the Andrew Carnegie Foundation, will build on an existing framework of student groups — including the Harvard National Security Journal and National Security and Law Association — and the expertise of faculty specializing in national security and related issues.

“There’s been a very active student presence, but what’s been missing is the faculty side of that,” Eichensehr said. “I joined the Law School last year in July 2025, and took up the mantle of getting this launched.”

While programming will include guest lectures and other events, Eichensehr pointed to two flagship efforts. The initiative will focus in its first year on separation of powers and the role of congressional policymaking, followed by a focus on the international legal system in its second year.

The initiative will host Avril D. Haines, the former director of national intelligence under former President Joe Biden, for a distinguished lecture drawing on her experience in the executive and legislative branches.

Its inaugural visiting fellow, Margaret L. Taylor, a former State Department legal adviser and former chief counsel on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, will co-lead a seminar in the spring on Congress’s powers in national security, alongside a conference examining the same topic.

“The two pieces of this are partly domestic and partly international. National security fundamentally crosses that domestic international divide, and that’s very much where my own research sort of lives, and how I tend to think about things,” Eichensehr said.

“National security is an increasingly capacious concept that has legal dimensions. It’s got political dimensions, but I think it’s crucial to focus on both the domestic side and the international side,” she added.

HLS Dean John C.P. Goldberg wrote in a statement that the initiative will mentor future generations while building on the school’s tradition of debating national security.

“Questions of national security are among the most consequential — and most difficult — that lawyers and policymakers confront,” Goldberg wrote. “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 program’s advisory board, chaired by former U.S. representative Jane L. Harman, includes former government officials who served across the administrations of former U.S. presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden — such as Harvard Kennedy School professor and former Biden national security adviser Jake J. Sullivan, former U.S. Trade Representative Katherine C. Tai, former CIA general counsel Courtney Simmons Elwood, and former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff ’75.

Eichensehr hopes to draw upon HLS’s “convening power” and extensive network of alumni toward engaging in bipartisan dialogue as part of the initiative’s educational mission.

“I’m hoping that the engagement of our students will foster new thinking, new ideas,” she said. “I think there’s a tremendous amount that the country and the world can benefit from new ideas and from thoughtful engagement from emerging thinkers at the law school.”

—Staff writer Uy B. Pham can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at ubp.88. Follow him on X @uybpham.

—Staff writer Sierra R. Pape can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on X @SierraRPape.