Tim Starks of CQ on Lawfare

When the House Judiciary Committee summoned experts in February to testify about the legality of drone strikes on U.S. citizens, all of them came from one blog: Lawfare. And when California Democratic Rep. Adam B. Schiff wanted to draft legislation creating a court to oversee such strikes, he consulted with one of the founders of Lawfare, Jack Goldsmith. It’s a common phone call from Capitol Hill to experts who write for the blog. Lawfare began in 2010 as a side project of Harvard law professor Goldsmith, who worked in the Justice Department under President George W. Bush, along with Brookings Institution scholar Benjamin Wittes and University of Texas law professor Bobby Chesney. Now it’s the go-to website about national security law for an influential cadre of Beltway policymakers, as well as academics, attorneys and journalists. It’s not so much the traffic — 2,000 to 3,000 visits a day on average, according to Wittes — as who’s watching it. Among the top six cities reading Lawfare in 2013 are Washington; Arlington, Va.; and McLean, Va., the latter two the neighborhoods of the Pentagon and the CIA.