Putting A Lot of Distance Between Lawfare and the Lawfare Project

Benjamin Wittes
Thursday, August 1, 2013, 10:49 AM

Back when we founded Lawfare nearly three years ago, I got a call from a woman named Brooke Goldstein, who runs a group called The Lawfare Project based in New York. She was interested in possible collaboration, having noticed our name. We were trying to stand up Lawfare as its own independent voice, so this was not plausible to us.

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Back when we founded Lawfare nearly three years ago, I got a call from a woman named Brooke Goldstein, who runs a group called The Lawfare Project based in New York. She was interested in possible collaboration, having noticed our name. We were trying to stand up Lawfare as its own independent voice, so this was not plausible to us. And it quickly became clear, in any event, that we had very different conceptions of what the word "Lawfare" meant and that Goldstein had a strong political agenda which we didn't share. So after a brief, polite, ships-passing-in-the-night sort of conversation, she and I went our separate ways. And until last night, Lawfare and the Lawfare Project have always taken a posture of benign neglect towards one another. Occasionally, people have confused us, and that's a drag, because the Lawfare Project is a combatant in the culture wars over national security law that we try to bridge. And it's a drag as well because Goldstein's particular form of combat sometimes crosses what I consider lines of propriety with respect to discussion of Islam and Muslims. That said, until yesterday, I never saw any reason to publicly denounce the Lawfare Project. Then I saw this:

The following is the Twitter exchange that ensued---with my thanks to Glenn Greenwald, Kevin Jon Heller, and Jameel Jaffer for their good humor.


Benjamin Wittes is editor in chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of several books.

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