Hi, so welcome to our talk a walk through the Kubernetes UI landscape My name is Joakim. I work for Kinfalk as a director of product engineering and I'm here with Henning Yes, hello everyone. My name is Henning and I work for Zolando Great. So without further ado What are we here to talk about so as you know Kubernetes is a complex project and of course You know people can use the QCTL or keep control whatever you want to call it But a way to make things simpler for everybody is to use graphical user interfaces So there are lots of projects out there and we are here to talk about them So we have we had to have some criteria in selecting those projects and those are Those have to be open-source projects. They have to be Underactive development so that means that they had a release in the last 12 months They have to be used standalone. So, you know, not needing add-ons or control plane for them to be usable and They can run of course either locally or in cluster But they have to be just just that just running standalone and they have to have a graphical user interface Yeah, some of the things we look into and we will mention this is the installation So it's a project supposed to be running cluster or locally on your desktop or You know, does it have multiple cluster support or does it only manage one cluster at a time? Whether it's extensible or not read-only or whether you can read and write And other things we'll talk about. So you see these icons here. They will be on each slide in case we don't talk about this Directly, you will know hopefully what it means So let's start Yes, let's start with a Kubernetes dashboard Next slide. So the official Kubernetes dashboard is pretty old. It's Compared to the other projects. It's from 2015 first release 2016 It's a tool you deploy to a single cluster and provides Workload overview for application developers You authenticate with a service account token. So you do Qtl proxy and then Still need to copy the bearer token into the first form. It provides some features like exactly into parts locks scaling workloads and Editing your deployments, for example It also provides a nice feature for searching across different workloads in the cluster So you can quickly find what you're looking for but it has a overall a relatively limited set of features and it's not extensible so overall, I would say the oldest and official Kubernetes dashboard is Interesting to get a overview of workloads but Doesn't have too many features You might need for further troubleshooting Right and by the way, do you think Still that you know being the official dashboard. Do you think it still lives up to do its You know to do its role or do you think people should look into other things now that we've looked into a bunch of stuff. I Think it still makes sense to check out the Kubernetes dashboard But there is a huge hurdle with the authentication So it I think the project doesn't really know what it wants to be if it's now a local tool or something Deployed so you have to deploy to a cluster, but you still need to a cube config or a bearer token to authenticate So it doesn't integrate with other authentication providers So in this way, it's a little bit in between Local and hosted solutions we will see later on Right and the next one is actually You know, it has many similarities with with the the official Kubernetes dashboard. So it's also running cluster. It's also meant to only manage one cluster and It's it's not extensible as well. So this is called Kate dash and It started as a project by someone called Eric her Branson. I hope I pronounce his name correctly It was stopped for a while But then I think indeed took over and now it's managed by indeed still with with Eric on the project as far as I can see You know, this is an interesting project because like I said, it provides a good alternative to to the official dashboard in my opinion and It's also it also feels very lightweight. So, you know, the UI is kind of Snapping comparison at least last time I checked both of them That said, of course, the UI could maybe be a bit refined From a design point of view or usability One nice thing that it has that the editor shows Documentation so when you're editing some some resource so you can and you don't remember exactly when What things go here and there you can just quickly look into it Yeah, and one Things that well a difference that with with the official ones that it does not have cluster search And also when I tried it with a view only token It kind of failed to start the the you know the UI But otherwise, it's it's a good project in my opinion So you already mentioned some differences to the official Kubernetes dashboard What would you now recommend what would you install in your cluster just looking at these two? Yeah, at least from you know from when I tried the official one and Kate dash I would say I would go with Kate dash For the reasons I said but also for example, if you want to to change something On on on one of the projects. I think it should be easier to do it on Kate dash just because the code base seems You know a bit smaller than of course a project that has been here for a while like like the official Kubernetes dashboard So, yeah, I would go with this one. I think Yeah, let's have a look at another project the cubis Cubis is quite different to the other two dashboards. We saw earlier because it's really about seeing app config and state and yeah checking if the state is safe and Following some of the rules you can define in the rule editor and integrated into this project So it barely helps you analyze your cluster. You can define custom rules. For example, that you don't want to run Docker latest tag or Special settings for example requiring memory limits, etc. Etc. And you can also have custom marker icon So I think this is a really interesting tool for for example platform teams to define Compliance rules and then check the cluster Accordingly another very interesting feature is time machine So you can go back and forth into in time and see when something changed and for example correlate this when with something going wrong in your cluster So for example label edit or removed, etc. The whole tool is only single cluster and it also has a stripped down portable version Because the time machine uses my sequel database in the back end So you can use a portable version, but then you don't have the time machine. Yeah It's only a read-only tool only single cluster extensible by these custom rules Yeah, that certainly looks interesting.  GitOps which also give you like a way to see which operations happen Yeah, I guess the time machine is a really interesting feature and it can really help to troubleshoot if when something is going wrong and then checking what was changed in the cluster But obviously like most of the changes should be done via CICD and maybe GitOps So all the changes should be tracked in Git But you might also use something like Postgres operator or other operator which also changes cluster state So the time machine would help you see these clusters state changes, which are not reflected in Git That being said, I never tried this time machine with a big cluster with many changes going on and many resources So I'm not sure how this scales with the database Great. Yes Octane that's a pretty popular tool. It's only locally available. It was created by VMware It has a quite nice UI and it's created for developers to better understand the complexity for of Kubernetes clusters so you start a local tool and then see the UI in your browser and it has some interesting features like this object graph, so you see resources and connected resources like for a port, a service, ingress, secret, etc And it has a very nice feature of port forwarding so you can go to a port or a service and then Enable port forwarding and you don't have to switch between command line or terminal and the browser because it directly happens in your browser and you can open the The tool it also provides plugins. There's also a recent plugin created for Jenkins X So if you use that maybe worth checking out It's a little bit sad that the tool doesn't have a global search so you cannot just search for something in the in the cluster like what is integrated in Kubernetes dashboard and it provides access to multiple clusters you defined in kube config But it doesn't have any cross cluster features great so This octant opens a browser window, so it's a local application, but it does not ship. It's You know, it's on browser view or web view Like others do you think this is an advantage or a disadvantage? I Think it's both, but I certainly can see some advantages for example Using bookmarks because if you use a standalone tool, then you often yeah have not the feature of Having bookmarks in the app itself and with octant you have your normal browser You can bookmark for example your deployment or your workload you usually look at and I think that's pretty neat So you can reuse features from the browser great and the next one is actually Similar in a way, so it's also an application that one runs locally it's also a multi cluster and it was actually So it's called lens and it was actually a proprietary tool by a company called container but the company did not succeed and at that time The I think some of the employees May made this project open source and then maranth is as far as I understand Purchased or acquired the assets from Contenna and now we have an open source application So like I said, this is this is similar to to octant in a way that it runs locally But it's it's like a full application in a way that it ships It's on web view and one thing that I really really like is that the so they the user interface and the user experience is really nice It you can access a lot of information, but it all seems to be Very well, you know in a good layout and very well thought of it also has like a helm chart store and Another interesting thing is that as far as I could understand it ships Cube CTL with it. So you if you update the application you always have an updated cube CTL You can use a terminal right away from the application itself So, yeah, it does not really have cross cluster features. So no and also no like a big search or anything and It's also not extensible So it looks pretty polished lens Yeah, how would you compare to octant both tools are local. So which one should I install and use? Yeah, so both are similar that that's true for me I would probably go with lens just because I think you know in terms of of the UI It works really well and not only it looks good But it actually you know the way things are laid out again and the capabilities you have are really good So I would go with it with lens for sure Yeah, and the the next project is a very curious one that is different from the rest. It's called cube nav and Yeah, so this one works on On your mobile on your mobile phone on on your cluster and also on your desktop and it allows you to manage several clusters as well I said it was a curious one not only because it allows all this but also because You know, it's it's a mobile first in a way that as far as I understand They focus on the mobile experience first and this reflects on the desktop UI So if you if you go and you list some some of the resources available in the cluster You don't see the typical table in there. You rather see a list so and this makes things a little bit more complicated to You know to understand sometimes at least in my In my experience with it because you don't see like okay Discarding is about the the creation date You actually see an entry in the in the entry itself of the of the list with the creation date or something so that so So yeah, so there is that that downside I would say but if you're looking for something beyond the desktop This would be a solution. I think One thing that was not clear was how to authenticate with it So I think it just took whatever was on the on the cube config and also There is no class no cross cluster features. So no no global search So do you think that having a mobile app is it's important for for like managing Kubernetes testers or workloads. I think that in times where People can travel You know, maybe it's important to have a way to just quickly Check on your clusters when you when you are on the app in the airport or something But I think that for for a day-to-day operations tool I think of course, I would rather use something that focuses on On a on an experience that we used to with the with a laptop or you know, that's the computer Yeah, so the next one I have to give a small Disclosure first so this is a This is a project. I'm involved in so this is a called the headlamp and it's a project created by kinfalk You can run this project also locally as an application for your You know computer or also in the cluster it has Multi-cluster support and one of its core features is that we have what we call front-end plugins So you can have a plug-in, you know, just let's say we don't have a graph view So let's say that you want to create a graph you you can create a plug-in for that And then the idea is that the plugins are actually outside of the of the cluster, right? So sorry of the of the UI so when you start the the UI you can point it to Directly with plugins and they will be available Another thing is that the so all the cluster actions We have at the moment like editing for example a deployment or something Those have a grace period when you click apply. So if you are editing something and you click apply You you suddenly notice that you made a mistake. You can just click cancel So it gives you like a small grace period for you to Kind of undo or cancel what you were about to do Yeah, not another thing that I think it's a mix for a good user experience is that we We don't assume that the users have a full administration Capabilities in the cluster. So if you don't if you cannot really edit Resource because you don't have that role in a cluster We don't show the the edit button or the delete button for example Yeah, and we do have like stuff like keyboard shortcuts and other features, but we do not have like cross-cluster Search for example, even if we have multiple cluster support. So so that's something we don't have So what was your motivation to create headlamp? Yeah, so King folk has a Kubernetes distribution called locomotive and at first of course we wanted something that we could use as a UI for it So we looked into the existing projects And and the idea was okay. We take one of these and we modify it We we keep a fork of it or we contribute what we can back But at the point at that point we realized none of the of those projects actually had all that we wanted so we decided to create a project and UI a project but not one that was like intimate or very intimate with with locomotive Instead we wanted to create basically what we were looking for so we created this project called headlamp And the idea is that for locomotive we will take this and we will you know create a couple of Plugins that will be more intimate with this project. So hopefully other people can You know use it as well Okay, next one it's actually my project I wrote a blog post last year about Kubernetes web UIs and I didn't really find what I was looking for so I created Kubernetes web U This is really focusing on read only view for multiple clusters and advanced features so I said it's kind of a Qtl for the web and Really for support and incident response so something you would deploy as a platform team and provide this to your users so you can always use permalink to link to certain parts or certain use or Certain errors or logs and this just works across multiple clusters. It uses plain HTML and CSS it also is responsive so you can also open this on your smartphone if you're traveling and It also has multi cluster features so you can search for workloads across Many clusters and it provides advanced queries and filters So for example, you can quickly look for all nodes with a certain version or a certain taint Across many clusters. So the whole tool is customizable So you can adapt this with templating and seems and so on for your like company needs and we have it deployed in the Use it pretty frequently It also provides like some power features like just download every view as a tab separated value file So this is all kind of more like plain and simple Read-only access for multiple clusters Great so one of the of the reasons one of the differences with With the other solutions we looked into is that this one is read-only, right? Is is the read-write capability something you you you don't need or do you expect that to be added later? So my focus was really Deploying this tool in a in a bigger corporate context something like salando where we have a few thousand developers and Like normal changes are done via CICD and get operations And so I don't really want humans to interact with Kubernetes directly and change something And he's definitely not on production So this view tool was really made for having a read-only view that being said It might make sense to have some right access for emergency situations in the future But this is really not a focus or priority. So Right now Not really planned. Maybe I'll add something if I see this is really valuable for myself or others great Yeah, and next we we have a quick Mention to about this project called K9 so this is a honorable mention because it does not really fit the the criteria of having a graphical user interface But when handing an awesome Twitter that we were doing this talk many people came and said that you have to check in Nines so Yeah, so this is a like I said, this is a common line interface tool That I would say it's it's like an extension to to kubectl if you want Because it gives you like a quick UI with a listing all the all the resources you have you can change them you can, you know Describe them you can get a shell into them But this is not the project that you have to either, you know run locally as an application with a with a web view or host in your cluster So so yeah, it's also very customizable if you want to create shortcuts keyboard shortcuts that is And and yeah, it seems simple enough and besides and very importantly it has a great logo, too So would you rather use the combat mind line tool like K9s or lens or octans for local as local too? So I think you know day-to-day I would use I Would use you know a graphical tool so one that Kind of guides me a bit better or a bit more Graphically into what I need to to do But that said, you know k9s seems like a very nice tool to just if you want to quickly check something or something is going wrong You can just quickly run it and see what's up But yeah for day-to-day I would go with the with the full graphical solution Okay, let's have a quick look at other UIs So we have some UIs which were also mentioned to us, but they require a control plane or something else installed So the wrencher dashboard UI actually looks pretty nice, but it's not available standalone right now Gardener is mostly for managing clusters link ad and Istio keali Our service measures so you need them installed weave scope is also pretty nice and But requires a probe app and portana It's not really a generic when it is your eye, but now has when it is support and requires some persistency Yeah, there are also some other projects which I mentioned for example in my blog post last year But some of them are now stale so constant late It's a stale cube man. I want to mention briefly because it has a very nice approach with recipes so we can define Recipes for views and queries across clusters, but sadly now also stale cubrics Stale cubanata We looked into but the latest release is a one-year-old and on docker hub and Kubernetes is was out because it's not open source Okay, we had a look at a lot of different UIs Joachim you also credit your own UI are also credit one So what would be your summary after looking through all these different tools? Yeah, so, you know, definitely that there are plenty of solutions out there for different use cases and Yeah, and for example, I'm very happy to see that Lens made our You know our project overview, which is something it would not have if it were still proprietary But so I'm very happy that it became open source and that also means that even if it's original creators in the company Or if the company is no longer around the project can still live on and you know Create value for for its users one thing that I think it's curious that I Notice is that many of the of the projects I Tested just assume that you have like full administration capabilities or Full admin role in the in the cluster so whereas, you know, maybe you have a company that Is is you know has to really review who can actually edit stuff Update stuff and delete stuff. So see what's curious to realize that And yeah, well, what do you think on your side? Yeah, I found it interesting that the the tool landscape changes over time So we now have some stale projects which might be a little bit sad But it's also nice to see new projects like KubeNav I only discovered as part of the preparations for this talk. So it's from this year and Yeah, maybe there are also new projects in the future and for me personally, it's interesting to have this Like the one side of tools which are really used locally like octand lens canine s And which is kind of personal preference like selecting your personal IDE, right? So it's kind of in the company and you don't necessarily want to prescribe this this local tools and then there is the other side of Tools you deploy actually to cluster and it's really a difference Whether you now choose a UI based on kind of your personal needs and maybe Using this for your own cluster or something you deploy into a cluster for your users Which also I need to consider like you mentioned this limited cluster access and different roles and maybe just read only access Etc. So in in Zalando we use Kubernetes Vapu because it's created for many clusters and just read only access for Thousands of developers, but this doesn't necessarily mean that it's the right tool for for your scenario So definitely check check out these different tools and you know, you probably have your list of requirements and needs To to to evaluate the tools, but yeah, and I hope that in that regard we we gave a Simple but you know, but useful overview of different tools Also, you know check out the the ones that need the control plan if if that's fine with your deployment too and And yeah, thank you very much for for attending and if you have questions, we'll run. Thank you very much. Thank you You


Hi, I'm Matthew Coast, head dating coach and founder at CommitmentConnection.com. And today we're going to talk about what do guys find attractive. So what do guys find attractive? If you're looking to attract a guy into a relationship of some kind, then knowing what men are attracted to is very, very important. So first let's talk about what is not attractive to men. So what guys are not attracted to is masculine women.  That is just not attractive. Talking about guy topics or acting like one of the guys that is not attractive to men and you will just end up as a friend. The second one is being a strong independent woman. Just recognize here though that there are attractive strong independent women and there are unattractive strong independent women.  And so don't expect a guy to be attracted to you because you're a strong independent woman. Just realize that you can be attractive as a strong independent woman. You can be very unattractive as a strong independent woman.  Thinking that men are the problem. This is a huge thing that is very unattractive to men. Women all the time if I go out and I'll talk to women about what I do and a lot of times women will be like, well, why are you helping women? Women don't need the help men do. Men are the problem. You need to go and fix men because men are what's wrong with relationships. And that attitude is really really unattractive and that will keep you single for a very very long time and it will destroy relationships that you get into. So another thing that is not attractive is trying to fix or make men the way that you want them to be. And so a lot of women kind of shame men or they condemn men or they try to force men to be the way that they want them to be. And that is just not attractive in any way. Men want you to love and accept them for who they are.  So what is attractive? Let's talk about what is attractive to guys. Feminine energy is really attractive to guys. So everybody men and women all have a feminine and a masculine side. And so if you want to be attractive to men, pull out your feminine side when you're around them or pull it out before you get around them so that it's open and expressive when you are around them. And that can be incredible. I mean it's just insanely attractive to men. Youthfulness. So being playful and youthfulness. A lot of women are like, oh men just want the youngest prettiest girl they can find. And there is some truth to that. But in reality what men really want is a woman who's youthful. If you act like you're an old woman, that is not attractive in any way. But being really playful, being really youthful, being really young at heart, that is incredibly attractive to men. So the next one is being a woman of value. Being valuable to a man in his life is incredibly attractive to men. So being someone who is valuable to him. Someone that he can see adding value to his life. That is really powerful and can be incredibly attractive. And so the more you can show that you're in alignment with who he is and where he's going, the more he can see you as being relationship material. And so the last one is connecting to his heart. Connecting to his emotions is really really powerful and really attractive. Men don't get emotions and women tend to get emotions a lot better than men do. And so if you can connect with your emotions and bring him into your world, not a world of expectations and trying to get him to do certain things because you showed your emotions, but just allowing yourself to be in your emotions and express your emotions in a healthy way, that can be incredibly attractive to men. It's not looked at as drama. A lot of women think that men think emotions are drama. That is not the case at all. What men think is drama is expectations, not emotions. Emotions are attractive. Expectations are unattractive. So that's it for today. If you want more information on how to attract a quality man into a committed, loving, secure relationship, make sure you go to my website, commitmentconnection.com and take the quiz there. I'm Matthew Coast and I'll speak with you again soon.


Today I'm taking you on a journey of introspection to answer humankind's impossible question. What is love? It's a tough one. So, take your time and since this is a digital production, you get to have plenty of it in your respective standard time.


I am not late. The schedule I am given says I am to be here at 9.45 so I am early, but I now understand that this is like a courtroom. I must be on guard at all times such that other lawyers may take advantage of the situation. Every year I come to Exxon-Provence. I am a commentator and Christian Mouly, he is the speaker. And he is supposed to speak for half an hour and then I will speak for 15 minutes and every year Christian Mouly speaks for an hour and I then can speak for five minutes or three minutes. So this year I am the speaker. But what do I find when I arrive at the conference? Christian Mouly is speaking. He spoke five minutes. Before I begin my presentation I wish to say something to the people, the students who are here from the East, from the Eastern Europe and what used to be the USSR. I wish to, how many students this morning are from the East? Well, maybe. I wish to address you on another subject than my talk. I first wish to congratulate you on the wonderful events that have occurred over the past few years and especially on the joyous occasion of the August Revolution. I wish to tell you that you are faced now with a magnificent opportunity. You have an opportunity to change the world. And by the world I don't mean your world, the world of Eastern Europe or Russia. I mean the entire world. It is the same opportunity that we had in the United States in the 18th century to change not only our world but the entire world. We learned from Europe in the U.S. We learned the good things that Europe had done. We also appreciated the bad things, the mistakes that Europe had made. And we improved on the situation in the U.S. We did not copy Europe. We did not imitate Europe. We took the good and we made it better. You now are faced with the same opportunity and you should do the same thing. You should not copy Europe. You should not copy the U.S. You should learn from the good that Europe has done and learned and you should learn from the good that the U.S. has done and then you must make it better.  You can be the leader of the world the way the U.S. has led liberals for some time. The leadership can go to you because the U.S. cannot improve at the rate you can improve. Everything is possible for you. It is much more difficult for us now. So this is your challenge. This is your opportunity not to copy, not to imitate but to learn from our mistakes which means we sometime must dwell on the negative. We must tell you what we have done wrong so that you may not repeat this mistake. Now this will be dangerous, of course, risky. Things could go badly. But it will be no more dangerous from now on than it has been up until this point. So this is the thing you must do and I, in a way, I envy your situation. I wish a comparable opportunity for change existed in my country that I could participate in. Well, let me now speak about my topic, the relation. Thank you. Let me now speak about justice and law. I said to many people last night that if I felt very spontaneous this morning I might instead speak on law and justice. I shall basically discuss the relationship between these two ideas, the idea of justice and the idea of law. What is the relationship between these two ideas? We must first realize that they are ideas. They are concepts. So what is the relationship between these two concepts? The concept of justice and the concept of law. There are three types of relationships I shall mention this morning. The first is that there is no relationship between justice and law, which I represent as the first. Justice and law are separate. There is an expression, law is law and no more. This is a view associated with positivism. The second view, which is a view that is compatible with liberalism and many philosophies, is that justice is higher than law, which I represent as the second chart, the second diagram. Justice is higher than law, superior to law. While I think that both of these two views contain some truth, there is a separation in some sense between law and justice and in some respects, law and justice I believe is higher or better than law. These two ways of thinking of the relationship between justice and law are misleading, I believe, and it would be better I think to think of justice and law as equals of the third chart. Each concept, each set of concepts influencing the other, each serving as it were, as a check on the other, a constraint on the other. Let me briefly define what I mean by justice. Without defending this conception, just offer you a definition. By justice I mean rights, the rights of the people. Rights are the means by which justice is recognized or in perhaps in French droire would be the term for justice or right. Law, on the other hand, by law I mean the rules, the specific rules and principles to guide individual conduct. What is written and said specifically, who gets which property, what is necessary to make a will, et cetera. How many witnesses do you need to a will or a contract? If justice then, rights are very abstract, they are very general, they lack specificity. The rights I have in mind are the right of private property, the right of freedom of contract. These are the two central pillars of rights that liberalism adheres to, that defines liberalism. But they are very abstract. They do not apply themselves automatically to a context, to a specific problem that may arise between two people, between Professor Mouli and myself, let's say. We know we both agree about property rights, we both agree about freedom of contract as it were, but perhaps we don't agree on what the time of this session is to begin or who is to speak first. What then do I posit to be the relationship between justice or abstract rights on the one hand and law or specific rules and principles on the other? The key to understanding the relationship between the two, well let me correct that. In answer to the positivist conception that these two are totally separate things, you have law, you have justice, they are separate. The key to understanding the deficiency of this view is the term or the word legitimacy, legitimacy. What is it about law that creates a duty to obey it? Another way of putting it, the way Aquinas put it. What quality has law, why is it that law creates, I'm sorry, that law binds in conscience? Why is law binding in conscience, in your conscience? Why is it if someone says this is the law that somehow you must do something different because it is the law? Why? Well, if law is law, law is simply whatever the command is, there is nothing that is binding in conscience. You have no duty of obedience. It is no more than if I told you you must do something or not do something. If law is, but we all believe that there is something about law that is binding in conscience that creates a duty of obedience, we think we do, we think we believe this, so what is this quality that law must have if it is to have this consequence, if it is to deserve this benefit that we give to it of saying if it is the law then we must obey it at least unless we are sure not to, but I mean at least presumptively we should obey it. What is it about law? What it is in my view is that law must be connected with justice. If law is unconnected with justice, it has not this quality. It only deserves this quality of creating a duty of obedience if it is connected with justice or rights. Now to fully appreciate the relationship between law and justice, it is necessary to become more, to understand better what rights are and why some things are rights and other things are not rights. And unfortunately in the time I have here I cannot really go into the analysis of rights. But let me simply say as a conclusion, as an assertion without argument, without even much explanation because of time, that in my view the concept of rights is a social concept, a concept that has a social function. If it had no social function we would not talk about it. And the function it has is to solve problems, problems that cannot be solved any other way than to go along with these concepts. And there are three large categories of problems that I shall only name, I shall not explain, that I believe rights solve. And these are the problems, the social problems of knowledge, which those of you who have read Hayek know something of what I mean. The problem of interest, for example, the fact that we all want to benefit ourselves perhaps at the expense of others, and the problem of power. These are large categories of problems that I cannot explain this morning, but I believe my conclusion is that the rights that liberals believe in, property and freedom of contract, are imperative because only property, by me as I mean private property and freedom of contract, can solve the social problems of knowledge, of interest and of power. Law is related to justice or rights because, again, I must simplify a more complex analysis. Law enables us as individuals to know what justice requires of us specifically. Without law, with only a knowledge of property rights and contract, freedom of contract, in the abstract, we would not really know who is to speak first, who is to use this room, who is to drive which car, etc. You need more specificity than justice by itself can provide. Law provides this knowledge. It solves a problem of knowledge also. Not the problem of knowledge Hayek talks about, but a further problem of knowledge that arises when we use justice to solve the problem of knowledge that Hayek does talk about. That is, how do we know justice? We know it by law. In addition, rules, specific rules, help us to detect partiality, which is a problem of interest, partiality in the judges who would rule for one person not because of justice, but because of money or because of influence. General rules that are specific help us to detect when this has happened. Law also helps us to avoid problems of power. It helps us to identify when power is being used incorrectly in error. It helps us to identify when power is being abused. In this respect, we may see law as a means of achieving the end of justice. Law as a means of achieving the end of justice. But does this not suggest the second conception of law, which is that justice is above law. Law as a means, justice is the end. What I have said suggests my sympathy with this conception. But now I wish to disagree a bit with this conception. The reason why it is misleading to place justice above law is because it suggests to liberals, especially liberal ideologues, of which I include myself as an ideologue. Ideologue is not bad. But it suggests to many liberals and other ideologues that you can deduce the specific rules of law directly or logically from the abstract principles of rights, biological deduction, so that if you really knew, if you really understood all the rights in the abstract very well, then if you think about it hard enough, logically, you can logically derive a rule to decide a particular controversy between two people. And I imagine that as I say this, many people in the room are recognizing that they themselves believe this to be true. But as a lawyer, I can tell you that this is not true. I believed it was true once when I was a law student and I went to school and I was reading all these cases and the professors were tormenting me with many problems and I had these liberal principles and I was supposed to, in my own mind, come up with the right answer and I found I could not. And I believed it was not simply my own failing in this regard, but I went once when I was a first-year law student to New York and I had spent an evening with Murray Rothbard. You may have heard of Murray Rothbard. He is a U.S. liberal and this evening while I was a first-year law student, my friend who was also a student went to Murray Rothbard and said, well, what about this fact situation and what about that fact situation we had heard in school? And Murray Rothbard, who of course knew all there was to know about these abstract principles, he said, what, what? Geez, I don't know. I don't know what to do. I don't know what the answer is. So he could not solve these problems. These problems are not solved this way in law. No. In fact, the truth is that we know what we do about justice, about property rights, about freedom of contract from the law. We did not have rights first in the sense of in our minds conceiving of rights first and then go out and make a legal system. We had a legal system first, deciding every case, attempting to do justice one by one without a concept in mind. And from this, spontaneously, has evolved a series of decisions and a certain amount of knowledge on our part from which we can generalize, coupled with our understanding of economics and philosophy, we can generalize and decide that certain things like private property and freedom of contract are essential principles of right. But the law was always there first. Well, if you cannot derive law directly or logically deduce it from justice, then what is the relationship between justice and law? The reason you cannot derive law from justice is because law, the specific rules are conventional. They are by agreement in a sense. They could be different and still be good or just. An example. It is, we are indifferent as to whether we drive on the left side of the road or on the right side of the road. Either way of driving is equally good. But it is imperative that we all decide to drive on one side or on the other side. So we could say in the situation that the natural right of the situation, I use this only as an analogy, but the natural right of the situation is that there must be one side of the road, must be one side of the road. That is the, and so, but the natural right of the situation is not that it is left or right. Whether it is left or whether it is right is by convention. So we can say a rule that says drive on the left is consistent with the natural right. A rule that says drive on the right is consistent with the natural right. But a rule that says drive on whichever side you like is inconsistent with the natural right. This is an analogy. It suggests that justice or rights can be used to criticize a rule as being contrary to the requirements of justice outside the boundary of defined by justice. But within the boundaries defined by justice, many different sets of rules can serve us equally well. So to use an example, a real example, not an analogy, the French law of contract law is completely different than the U.S. law of contract. The rules of contract are different in France than they are in America. But given the same facts of a lawsuit, French courts using French law totally different will reach essentially the same answers as the U.S. courts using U.S. law totally different reach basically the same answers. If you must think of an analogy to understand how this is possible, think of a computer, an IBM computer. There is an IBM computer and there is an IBM clone, IBM compatible computer. The microchip inside the computer of the IBM compatible computer is completely different than in the IBM computer. That's why it doesn't infringe the patent. It's completely different. But it is constructed in such a way that if whatever you type in, it will come out the same as an IBM computer. What is inside the chip is by convention in a sense, but the outward constraints you need, the keyboard input, you need the screen output. This is all the same. Two things that are different operate functionally the same. This is true of law. Two sets of laws can be different, but they can operate functionally the same. And what we want to do with justice is to see if the way they operate is compatible with justice or rights or incompatible with justice or rights. So to summarize what I have said so far, justice does not dictate a unique set of rules or law, but justice can be used to constrain law by saying some things are impermissible to do with law. This way law is used in the case by case to discover what we know about justice. The arrow goes one way and justice is used once derived, once discovered as we have in many respects is used as a criterion for evaluating the law we have in any given situation. The arrow goes the other way too. In that sense they both are necessary and in some sense equal. Both are necessary. Neither is sufficient by itself. Now let me now turn my attention from this rather conceptual discussion to a discussion of how this works in practice. How is it we can establish this reciprocal relationship between justice and law in practice? What we need, what we require, is a system that imparts legitimacy on law. We need a legal order that is such that the laws that result from the legal order are going to be just. Earlier in the week, Eamon Butler referred to a remark made by Bismarck that is to the effect that you do not wish to know how sausages are made and also you do not wish to know how law is made. The reason is of course there it is both the disgusting processes both. But I wish to pursue this analogy that Bismarck mentions a bit further because when you go to the store and you buy a sausage you do not test that sausage to see if it is wholesome or to see if it is infected. You assume it is wholesome. How is it that you assume this? In a sense that sausage has legitimacy not legitimacy with respect to justice but legitimacy with respect to hygiene or disease. It is presumed to be wholesome or good. Why? Because there is reason to be confident that the way it is made is the way to produce healthy sausages. That even in the sausage factory they don't look at every sausage as it comes off the line. They maybe inspect one randomly and they inspect another but they basically don't inspect all the sausages. But they have designed a system that if it works the way it is supposed to will generally produce good sausages. So the system must be designed away so that we have confidence that without testing each sausage we believe each one is probably okay. Knowing of course a bad sausage can also exist occasionally. Laws are similar. We cannot test every law individually each person to see if each law is consistent with justice. It is impractical. We are not knowledgeable enough. We don't have a good enough perspective. We are too partial in our views. We just impractical. We also are too busy with our own affairs to test the justice of every law that is made. In this case how is it we can achieve a correspondence between justice and law? We must have a procedure of making laws such that given our experience like our experience of making sausages we can have some confidence that if a law emerges from this procedure then presumptively not absolutely presumptively it is probably a just law. So our emphasis must be at this point on what is the procedure what is the system that would support this confidence that would justify this confidence that would justify a presumption of legitimacy for any law that happens to be enacted. Therefore we cannot be neutral about the procedures by which law is made. We must be critical to see that it is procedures that give rise to confidence not just any procedure that may happen to be. There are many aspects of procedure that are necessary for this legitimacy to occur and I cannot speak of all of them. But in the interest of the Eastern Europeans and the Russia and the former USSR people especially I wish to talk about some because you are now in a position to actually you might in fact you must figure out what sort of legal system you will have from now on. You must in a sense make this world anew and so I will discuss a few principles I believe are necessary that must be incorporated into a system. There are many ways to incorporate these principles but I believe these principles are essential to keep justice and law together together in a legal system. The first is to have a place in the legal system where in a sense we explicitly try to make law correspond to justice. A place where someone is thinking is this law just. So someone must have some idea of justice and they must be looking at a law and they must evaluate it somewhere and who is this someone usually but a judge. So somewhere in the system a neutral magistrate between the lawmaker the legislature and the people or the individual who is subjected to the law a neutral magistrate must evaluate the law to see if it is just. In the U.S. this concept is known as judicial review judicial review it is controversial sometimes because people wonder what gives judges the right to do this but it is essential. And in the U.S. also judicial review is done sometimes on the basis of a bill of rights. It is not essential that it be a bill of rights but this is one of the purposes of a bill of rights that sometime a judge can say hold a law up against the rights when a citizen is complaining and say the law is consistent with rights or the law is inconsistent with rights and if the law is inconsistent with rights it is no is no it's not a law. It is outside the boundaries of justice and law and therefore it is not good it is null. In addition the other people in society who are to evaluate the law to see if it is just besides judges are professors are theorists philosophers these people all have a right and a ability to make judgments about the justice of a law. Economists of course we know have no such ability it is a joke. So there must be other observers outside the system to make these judgments but the people in the system must be told to listen to these people as they are told in some European countries by means of the code the civil code tells them to listen. Okay that's one element judicial review actually explicitly thinking is this law consistent with rights. Now let me talk about some things that are not explicit some structural aspects of a legal system that are necessary to achieve a relationship between justice and law. This is not a complete list I shall speak of two principles that have proven valuable in the West in the US. The first is the principle of separation of powers I shall say more in a second. The second is the principle of reciprocity establishing reciprocity reciprocity between reciprocity between the law giver the law maker and the person who must follow the law. Now how are these two principles achieved separation of powers and reciprocity between law maker and law receiver. In the US this has been done by a formal separation of powers formal separation of powers between the judiciary the judges the executive the president and the bureaucracy and the Congress the legislator legislature formal separation as well as a separation between the federal government and the state governments many separations of powers. This has proven this is good but it has proven to be deficient because eventually these formal separations break down these so-called separate groups cooperate with each other at the expense of justice at the expense of the people and it is difficult to separate them again or to resist them once they have joined together as they have but the idea of separation of powers is good it is the implementation of the principle that has been deficient. The second principle of reciprocity between law giver and law receiver has been attempted by means of voting. You elect your representative your representative goes to the legislature and there is supposed to be reciprocity therefore between your representative and the voter the citizen such that if the representative acts improperly you don't vote again for them. This has proven not to work very well either. For two reasons mainly one is the citizen doesn't know enough about what the representative does to judge the representative accurately. This is a problem of knowledge. The second is that the citizens themselves begin to vote out of interest rather than justice. This is it or shall I say some citizens have an interest in voting certain ways because they are special interests and they vote as a block whereas other citizens have very diffuse interests and are not involved enough because of the diffuse interest to vote a certain way. So the special interests have undue influence this way over the legislatures not the average citizen. Both of the deficiencies of structural constraints structural separation of powers and voting can be found in the literature of public choice. The public choice school of economics discusses the deficiencies of these principles the deficiencies of the implementation of these principles. So if you were interested in this more you should read in this literature of public choice. How is it that we as liberals can perhaps conceive of a better legal order than these and a better way of putting into effect into practice separation of powers and reciprocity. I shall make a suggestion now and then that this will be the end of my talk. Essentially what I believe is necessary and at this point I speak only for myself. I do not speak for all liberals. But what I believe is the real constraint well the problem with the strategies already attempted is that they are political strategies solely involves political systems, political rights, political procedures, politics. But the real constraints that we know as liberals exist are market constraints. Those are genuine constraints, political constraints are illusions often. They are what James Madison, founding father of the U.S., author of the U.S. Constitution, referred to as parchment barriers, paper barriers, political constraints or paper barriers. Market constraints are genuine barriers. So we must somehow I believe infuse the legal system with market constraints. The way we want wish to infuse the automobile system, the food system, all the other systems with market constraints. And how is this to be done? This is very new. This is very different. It seems, it sounds. There are two principles by which we create market constraints. The first principle is that of freedom of entry and exit. Firms are constrained because others may freely enter their market and they may be forced to exit the market. That is a genuine constraint. Freedom of entry and exit. The second genuine constraint from the market that the second principle by which the market provides constraints is consumer choice. I buy Toyota instead of General Motors. That's a genuine constraint. Neither of these constraints exists presently in the legal system to a great enough extent. There is no freedom of entry and exit to provide legal services. And there is very little consumer choice as to which legal system you will participate in. The only way you exercise any choice as to which legal system you participate in is by what country you choose to live in or what state of a union you choose to live in. And this is a very costly choice to exercise. To exercise a choice for Canada as opposed to the U.S., I would have to leave my whole life behind. So I am unlikely to do this. Whereas I can exercise a choice for Japanese cars over American cars very simply. I can stay right where I am. Exercise this choice. Similarly, unlike the automobile companies which are prohibited from putting out of business their Japanese competitors, they should be anyway, the legal system can put out of business any competitor. It assumes a monopoly unto itself. And thereby there is no constraint. There is no market constraint. So the two principles that must be infused in a legal system for it to be under genuine constraints is first that it cannot have a monopoly. It cannot put rival legal systems out of business by force. And this is a simple application of the liberal principle of freedom to contract. It cannot interfere with a agreement between you and another legal system that they should be your legal system. That is your freedom to contract with another legal system. To interfere with this is to interfere with freedom to contract. And the second characteristic a legal system must have is it cannot confiscate its revenue by force the way it does. Denying consumers any choice and obtaining the money whether the consumers like the service or not. It must charge fees and it must be concerned that if its fees are too high or unreasonable you will go to another legal system for its services. This is another genuine constraint. It must also be responsive to the consumers in terms of the law it provides as well. Because if it's the law is unjust then you can go to another system where perhaps the law may be more just. Now this may sound very radical and it is a change. But it is there are elements of this in our own history. There are elements even now of this sort of thing. There are for example many different court systems in every country. First of all there are many countries each with its own court system. And then there are within countries like the U.S. there are many different court systems. And in history in England for example before the rise of the hierarchical state there were many competing court systems. And this story of the competing court systems can be found in two books that you may wish to look at. The first book is called Law and Revolution by Berman. And the second book is The Enterprise of Law by Benson. Bruce Benson is a historical book. The story of the origins of law in the West which was competitive and how it became subsumed by both the church because of the church and the state into a hierarchical system which it had not been before. The Benson book is Benson is an economist and he discusses the economics situation the economics of this sort of thing and as well as contemporary and historical examples. So I urge you if this interests you to look at these things. So even though these proposals to infuse the market into the legal system sound radical they are in fact really only a small departure in theory from things we have already experienced. And I would be happy to explain more about this perhaps in the question period if I have the opportunity. These two principles yes these two principles no jurisdictional monopoly and no confiscation of income will enable us to put into practice the principles of separation of powers genuinely and the principles of real reciprocities. Though they sound radical even if they are the events of the recent weeks as if it has taught us nothing else it has taught us that even radical things are possible.


We were sternly warned not to spend too much time praising the biographies of our esteemed speakers. You just heard a very brief set of the highlights of Harold Koh's biography, but the really important thing to know about Harold is that he has made a career of making the legal profession, the human rights profession, the national security profession, and the White House angry at him for his efforts to do exactly what we're going to talk about here today, balance the competing demands of law, human rights, and the realities of warfare past, present, and future. So we start this conversation at a moment where the war of the present, if you will, the conflict we're fighting against ISIS, has been going on for more than six months now without benefit of any of any oversight or brush of authorization from Congress. And we're at this really interesting moment where we say, you know, if the tree fails to fall in the forest, does it make a difference? Does the fight that we're having on the hill right now about whether, how, and for what Congress should authorize the president to do what we've already been doing for six months make a difference? And Harold's going to bring us up to date a little bit on where we are with that fight and why it matters, and then we'll try to get into some of the bigger conversation about what this fight tells us about the role of Congress and through Congress the public is in the future of war. So thanks, Heather, and thanks for including me in this conference. I'm just a Connecticut lawyer, but I learned in the Beltway bottom line up front, and it's pretty simple, which is supersede and sunset, but not silence. That concludes my remarks. No, we're talking about the future of war. So we should be able to agree on what war must be and what it must not be. So it must be lawful and it must not be perpetual. It has to end. And so that's the balance that the administration is trying to strike in the AOMF between lawful, sufficient legal authority to defeat ISIL, and ending the forever war, namely not perpetuating the longest war we've had in our history by letting it mutate to fight everybody who comes along. Now this is important because we're at a rare moment in this town where people are actually talking about this question. There are very few moments apart from Pearl Harbor or 9-11, where people actually are all ready to consider the question. But right now, I think Congress is too fixated on the first goal, it's sufficient legal authority. And so they're overlooking the second goal, which is how to end the forever war. And I want to say that that's more important because the armed conflict with al-Qaeda that began in 2001 is 14 years old. It's the largest, longest war in American history, eight years longer than the Revolutionary War, ten years longer than the Civil War of World War II. If it goes on longer, it will be a forever war. And it's distorting. So as the President said at the NDU in 2013, how do we continue to fight terrorism without keeping ourselves on a permanent perpetual war footing? The balance that we're trying to strike then is between sufficient authority and how to eventually bring the war to an end. And I want to say this very carefully. If Congress over broadly authorize a fight with ISIL that mutates endlessly to include new enemies, and if we don't have a process for reexamining this AUMF, then Congress would have passed the 21st century Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. And history will have its judgment on that. So how to prevent this from happening? Very simple. The new AUMF must say something about the 2001 AUMF. What's the relationship between the new ISIL AUMF and the 2001 AUMF? There are two possible relationships, addition or subtraction or substitution. Let me say addition or substitution. First, it can simply add to the legal authority that the President already has under the 2001 AUMF, in which case it's redundant. It's a three-year belt to go along with the existing AUMF suspenders. Why would Congress want to pass such a bill if it's purely additive? I'm not sure why either Democrats or Republicans would want that. On the other hand, it could be read as a substitution or a switch where the ISIL bill, the ISIL AUMF, becomes the President's exclusive lawful authority for fighting Congress with a narrower specific later in time statute. And some of the administration tell me that's what they think it's doing. It's substituting or switching, not adding, but it's silent. It doesn't say anything about that. This is a huge omission. Is two and two four or is two and two two? We have to know. So in brief, my takeaway and your takeaway should be that they should supersede and sunset but not have silence. And that's what needs to be added. Now there's language if you want it in the Democratic bill from the Center for Relations Committee section six says simply the provision of this law shall supersede any preceding authorization for the use of military force versus ISIL. And in addition, it sunsets the 2001 AUMF, not just the ISIL AUMF, three years after enactment. Now, if we're going to have to look at the state of the conflict with ISIL in three years, why not look at the whole picture? And I've heard no good argument against either supersession or sunsetting. I'll say it again. I've heard no good argument against either supersession or sunsetting. Because if Congress is not voting to supersede, it's not doing anything real. It's just giving the President more authority. He already has two AUMFs. If you had a third without a sunset, that perpetuates the war. And you have belt and suspenders when the suspenders have already been stretched pretty far. Second, a sunset, and this is so important, it's not a repeal. A sunset is not a repeal. It's not even a proposal to repeal. It's simply a collective agreement to assess the situation together as a nation in three years' time. And it helps that we're operating under a veil of ignorance. So I heard from last speaker about Kant and I heard about John Stuart Mill. You know, John Rawls talks about the veil of ignorance. It's good that we don't know who the President and who Congress is going to be. It's good we don't know what's going to be happening with ISIL. Because what we want to know in understanding an appropriate role is whether Congress will be at the table in deciding what kind of battle we want to fight. So that's my bottom line here. How to strike the balance between sufficient legal authority and not having an endless war that distorts the shape of our society going forward, that shifts resources, that subjects people to a kind of extraordinary emergency powers that creates human rights issues. The answer is simple, supersede and sunset, but absolutely not silence. Now, there are a lot of people here who have ability to affect this debate. And I say take that message away. Thanks. So you dropped the Gulf of Tonkin in there and that's obviously the sound bite of this. What sound bite? Gulf of Tonkin? They don't teach you anything up in Connecticut, do they? So the relevance of that, it seems to me, is the eventual takeaway from the public about the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution is we relied into war, war loses its legitimacy. We have, it seems to me, this huge problem with this new form of war, of how war gets and keeps legitimacy. And this leads to some of the points you were making. It also leads to the problem of can our Congress function well enough to give war legitimacy, to ensure that there's a lash up between what we're having our troops do in our name and what we actually think we've agreed. Do you, putting your hat back on as an administration policymaker, do you see any realistic hope that the Congress we've got can actually have a sunset debate in three years time, can look in a timely fashion at whatever ISIS morphs to next and what needs to happen to make that possible? So Congress says all the time it wants to debate and have oversight over war making, it says it every single day. So if you have a forced moment where they have to talk about it, even if simply to say we renew, I mean they renewed the Patriot Act when its sunset, it doesn't guarantee a massive debate. But it means that Congress hasn't given an unlimited blank check in which they have no oversight. So why should they want to do that? Now I know people might want a blank check, but so does my son and I don't give it to him. So if you are serious, I mean the question here is, are people serious? They may not be, most of the time on these political issues people try to avoid making tough decisions. I can understand that, but here we are. And the question is, you have two authorizations to the use of force on the table, the 2002 and the 2001. Both of them are old and both of them have cited as authority. Now the president's asking for a third one, which he says he'll sunset in three years. So why not a fourth one? Why not a fifth one? Why not forever? Congress can give these blank checks and then it could say it did something and have no oversight whatsoever. But if you're gonna have a meaningful oversight and a meaningful constitutional process, there must be a moment where we all talk about it. And why not do it in a couple years' time when we know who the president is, when we know who Congress is, and we know how well we're doing against ISIL? Earlier panels have talked quite a bit about the nature of national security being competitive coalition building. That the society that does best in conflict of the future will be the society that's best able to pull together diverse and changing and effective coalitions. It's often ill understood by those of us who don't come from the legal background or who aren't familiar with societies that maybe visibly fetishize international law more than we do, the relevance that legal norms play in building and holding coalitions together. Can you talk a little bit about why it matters that this conflict is conducted lawfully and how our coalition partners and how your counterparts in our allied governments look at our seeming indifference to the legal basis for what we're doing? Well, when I was assistant secretary of human rights and we dealt with China, which wanted to be a great power, we said, if you want to be part of the international system or a leader of the international system, you have to play by the international rules. And that applies to us as well. Our allies, particularly the smaller allies are deeply committed to a system of international law because it's what gives them a seat at the table. And they were very, very badly bruised during the first decade after 9-11 by the feeling that we were essentially invoking international law and it helped us and avoiding it when it didn't help us. And I think the administration has gone a long way toward two things. First, trying to put our domestic actions on a statutory basis and second, trying to square that with international law. So what I'm saying here is simply a continuation of that general theme. If you're gonna fight a specific war against ISIL, have a statute that for three years puts you on that basis, consistently with international law and demands review. And if you really mean it, switch. Switch from the 2001 AOMF to that. Leave it otherwise unchanged. But say in three years we're gonna take a look at it and decide whether Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and associated forces are the real enemy in 2018 or not. I'm not sure why that's a devastating thing to act. 17 years after 9-11 to ask, do we really wanna be declaring war or have a declared war against a group that we may have decimated? And by the way, in every other war in history, we've done that and that's how Congress keeps its input in and that's how we stay true in international law. How do you answer the critics who say, and I think you're not human if you haven't felt this at some point, why on earth are we even having this conversation about an enemy that burns human beings alive, puts women into sexual slavery, throws people out of buildings? What on earth is the role of international law that was designed as a system between peer states if the future of war is dealing more and more with this kind of opponent? Well, Senator once asked me, professor, and by the way, in Washington, professor's not always in term of respect.  And I said, you know, Senator, the whales haven't signed the whaling convention either. It's not a contract. It's not about, or as Senator McCain put it very well, it's not about them and who they are. It's about us and who we are. And it's about a minimum standard of treatment. And we profess to be leaders of the human rights community. In fact, I think we are. And it's partly because we care about these minimum standards. When you think about how US law on declaring war and commercial oversight of war has evolved over time and you look at this conflict we're having now, where are we going? What's the next? What's the next? What will we be talking about at the fifth or 10th ASU New America Future of War conference? What's the thing that we most urgently out of the several really key problems with the current AUMF debate, what's the thing that it's most important to get right now for the conflict we face in five or 10 years? So, law drives conduct. And the war powers resolution, which was passed in the early 70s, was about no more creeping war, no more extended ground troop commitments. And it was one of the many factors that has helped drive activity away from that. But what it did was it created a greater premium on actions that could be completed in less than 60 to 90 days and on covert actions. And if what we're moving to now is cyber conflict, special ops and drones, the laws that we have aren't very good at addressing those situations because they speak in terms of physical concepts like armed forces equipped for combat, entering enemy airspace, et cetera, et cetera. Which means we need a process for updating these laws to the 21st century. And in fact, we're in a moment of absolute deadlock where we can't even figure out whether we wanna fund Homeland Security or not. I mean, I didn't think that was a tough question. So, if you do not have a situation where the political branches are able to update the laws to meet new situations, then you're gonna have to get people to either say the law doesn't apply, which I think happened a lot in the last administration. We're in some kind of black hole. It's a Tina Turner moment. What's law got to do with it? What's law but a secondhand emotion or a sweet old fashioned notion? I think the better way is translate. Translate the spirit of the laws, Montesquieu's idea. Maybe the exact words of the Geneva Conventions or other laws of war don't apply. But what is the spirit that applies to the situation? And you can debate whether the translation is accurate or not, but at least you're trying to be true to the spirit of the law. What makes this moment special, and that's why I said what I said is, there's an unusual confluence of events where the president has asked for an authorization for the use of military force. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is interested. The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee is holding a hearing tomorrow. People are talking about it. And it's something where the president went back to this issue having decided in an earlier time it wasn't politically opportunity to raise it. So if we're coming into a debate like that, let's strip away the details and get down to the bottom line. And I think the bottom line is supersede and sunset, not silence. So 10 years from now we will come back to this conference and we will look back at the discussion which led to the passage of an AUMF and the creation of the Tina Turner Doctrine as one of the first outcomes of this conference. And with that I wanna invite your questions. We've got a lot of people in the audience who have had a great deal to do with this issue set over the years. So we've got about 10 minutes. Okay, Charlie Dunlap. Dean Good to see you. We hear a lot about we don't want a forever war and I think everybody agrees with that. But as we say in the military, the enemy does get a vote. And are you concerned at all about the sunset clause and the impact that it'll have on allies and the adversary? The adversary will obviously build a strategy against that for years. And could we not address the out of control blank check through Congress's authority to govern the resources that the armed forces gets? Well, I see the productive way in which the Congress's power to govern the resources being applied at the moment. So I mean, the point about having a deadline is it makes people talk ahead of the deadline. If I want my student to talk to me about their paper, I tell them the deadlines next week, not because I think they're gonna finish it next week, but because I think they might come and talk to me. And that's the process. So the war powers resolution try to use deadlines as substitutes for dialogue. But what we need is real dialogue. And I think if you don't have a dialogue, then it's been delegated. So for example, some people think that you should have some sort of foreign terrorist organization, FTO designation, where Congress gives some kind of authority and then other people add names to the list. And I worked with the FTO process for many years in the State Department. You never get any credit for leaving a name off the list. You just get blamed if it's not on the list. And a group with that name or somebody connected to it does something. So you've created a ratchet where Congress is endlessly giving perpetual authority. The executive branch has incentives to add Heather Holbrook and her family if they happen to have a funny name. Because why should they not have that on the list? And that's not dialogue. That's not real oversight. That's not meaningful. So the question is what's meaningful? The problem is Congress uses gimmicks to promote dialogue. And the President talks about dialogue, but it's often easier to operate without dialogue at a moment where they're actually talking about a process. Let's create a process that actually forces or guarantees some kind of dialogue. And if you want to get ahead of this set, a sunset in three years and in two and a half years they'll be talking pretty seriously. They have to. They have to. And it could be that the deadlock is worse than, I don't think it can get worse. So it'll probably be better. So that does raise the question of whether the AUMF itself is a gimmick, Harold, since we've been fighting for a number of months before it was passed. I prefer the term action forcing events. Fair enough, Greg Craig. Harold, I'd like you to contemplate a scenario that I know is unrealistic, but might possibly occur where the Congress does nothing on this issue because of the wide disagreements as to the scope of authority the President should be given. And the President then asks you, what are the legal consequences and the political consequences if the Congress does nothing at this point? Well, that essentially happened six months ago and the President started fighting this war against ISIL under 2001 AUMF authority. I wrote a blog post on this and the excellent Just Security blog to which I direct your attention, www.justsecurity.org. But my basic point is what, as Greg knows better than anybody, what is legally permitted is not always what's best politically or as a matter of good governance. And fighting war is based on old statutes and stretching them, leaves the President hanging out there until a mission goes bad or until Congress decides that it doesn't really like that interpretation after the fact. And then you have debates over how much Congress acquiesced or not. So in this town, there's a lot of talk about doing stuff straight up. This is one of those moments. Hi, my name is Colin Agee. I wanted to run with your Tina Turner analogy and I'm thinking of the song Proud Mary because the song starts out nice and easy and that it gets nice and rough. Yeah, I thought about it all the time. Left a good job in the city. There you go. And so your point is well taken that wars should not last forever. But I want to pin you down. Does that mean that you advocate that we should be more aggressive so that we could drive them to a favorable conclusion? And do you think we've got the national will and the political ability to take that course of action? No, I'm saying if you have new wars against new enemies, have new moments of political debate and authorizations. We're a long way from September 11th. So how long are we gonna ride the 2001 AOMF horse? You know, arguably we rode it too long already. You know, when these other wars, which were huge events in our country, when we thought the enemy was essentially defeated, then the Congress reconsidered whether to fight a new war against a new enemy. And by the way, when that happens, the executive branch goes to Congress and presents the intel on what it will take. And you have a new moment of agreement. It's a recommitment ceremony to a consultative process and recommitment ceremonies work even between people who aren't getting along so well. Okay, so now we've entered into the marriage therapy. So it's probably pretty close to the end, but we'll take one more question. Hi, Harold. It's Harvard. Hi, Harvey. How you doing? American Bar Association. I just wanna turn for the last question. The concept, which I think you've been thinking about what your current thinking is about the law of armed conflict and cyber conflict, which was we dealt with yesterday. And was Stuxnet an act of aggression that crossed a threshold? And where your current thinking is about how you apply the law of armed conflict to the cyber arena? So I think we need generally accepted principles on this, and it has to be done at a multilateral level. Just before I left the government, I gave a speech out at Cyber Command, and we did something very simple, which is we said, are there 10 propositions on which everybody in the government agrees? And remarkably, there were 10, plus there were three more on which people were ready to say something publicly. And then I said, well, since everybody in the government agrees on 10 propositions about how international law applies to cyber conflict, why don't we write them down? And there's a lot of concern. Why do we say anything about this? I think because we want people to know that we are operating in the cyber conflict realm differently from the Chinese and others who would prefer for this to be a black hole. We're trying to translate. So that was in the Harvard International Law Journal. There is the Tallinn Manual, which has tried to do it in exhaustive detail, but that's not state practice. So I think the next step is to take shared principles to our major allies and start to get some basic agreement on propositions. And the question, what is aggression is a huge deal because as you know, the International Criminal Court is a couple of years away from finalizing a crime of aggression, right? So will it be that someone who authorizes, and as the most tricky thing, which Harvey know better than anybody, is in a world in which response, I'm sorry, action and response are instantaneous. How do you know who the aggressor is? Which is one reason why the president was so careful, I think, with regard to the Sony incident to call it an act of cyber vandalism as opposed to aggression or some other term that's very fraught or triggers other activities under international law. So I think that's what you're gonna be talking about in the years ahead. And it's an incredible challenge and it goes to something else very basic about law. So much of our law, so much of international law turns on certain territorial concepts and physical touchings, sovereignty, territory, crossing borders physically. And when you have someone sitting in Maryland hitting a key, how are you gonna characterize that? And there's a limit to how much it can be done by extrapolation from physical concepts. You're gonna have to come to a new set of paradigms on this and this is better done in consultation with like-minded countries with the same kind of commitments and similar technological capacities as well as similar commitments to international law. Well, on that note, the Tina Turner Working Group will meet in the back over lunch and please join me in thanking Harold for this very provocative, thought-provoking.