The Reviews

Happy New Year to all Lawfare readers.  Starting this month, Lawfare will be offering a new feature, which I will be editing alongside the Book Reviews.  This new feature (tentatively titled just plain "Reviews") will bring to Lawfare readers a variety of articles, reports, essays, websites, organizations, and other sources that we - well, mostly I - think are worth checking out.  We're aiming at sources and materials that we hope will be useful to some of the different constituencies that read Lawfare - academics, of course, but also policymakers, government lawyers, judges, think tank analysts, journalists, military and intelligence community personnel, national security private contracting and consulting firms, international organization staff, non-US government diplomats and staff, and NGO advocates, among others. The emphasis here is "useful" and "practical" beyond the pure academic debate.  We are looking to feature items that the non-academics would find of some real-world, practical importance in some way, but might not otherwise reach these communities.  Some of these items will have been mentioned in other Lawfare posts, but most of them will appear only in the brief notes mentioning them.  They will be identified by "Reviews" in the title - to distinguish them from the separate Book Reviews section - and rather than appearing in the sidebar, for the moment they will be listed under the Review category. We will continue to tweak and make changes to this section as we go, but hope this will be a good start to this new feature.  (The name might change, for one - this section will not feature reviews in the "critical review" sense of the book reviews; it will be more like a "curated" selection, and perhaps should be called "Utilities" to emphasize its practical nature. Stay tuned.)  If you want to bring items to my attention, please drop me a note at anderson dot lawfare at gmail dot com, though I will exercise ruthless and idiosyncratic judgment in what I post.  Thanks for your continued interest in and readership of the Lawfare blog, and all best wishes in 2012.