Harold Hongju Koh’s The National Security Constitution in the 21st Century is a code red threat assessment of the state of public law in America today. True to Koh’s nature, he does not leave us without hope; rather he devotes a sizeable portion of the book to calls for reform, from the legal frameworks governing war powers and intelligence to the division of labor in the national security legal bureaucracy plodding away within the deepest (secure) chambers of the executive branch itself.

I have elsewhere shared my thoughts on war powers reform, Congressional oversight, and the legal bureaucracy. These primarily reflect concerns—shared by Koh, among others—with containing an ever-aggrandizing Executive, an objective that is all the more urgent today.