Lawfare – Using/Misusing Law to Achieve Objective

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Speaker: Kittrie, O. (Defense of Democracies).

Date: June 2016.

Orde Kittrie is a Professor of Law at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He is a leading expert on nonproliferation law and policy with a focus on Iran sanctions. He is also an expert on international law, including especially as it relates to the Middle East, and author of the book Lawfare: Law as a Weapon of War (Oxford University Press, 2016). The book describes how and why law is becoming an increasingly powerful and prevalent weapon of war, and illustrates this development with examples of lawfare use by the U.S., China, Israel, the Palestinians, and several non-governmental organizations and individuals.

Prior to entering academia, Kittrie served for eleven years at the United States Department of State, where he received the Department’s Superior Honor Award and its Meritorious Honor Award. As the Department’s lead nuclear affairs attorney, Kittrie helped negotiate five U.S.-Russia nuclear agreements and a U.N. treaty to combat nuclear terrorism. In other assignments at the State Department, Kittrie served as the department’s lead attorney for strategic trade controls and as a lead attorney for public affairs and public diplomacy. He also served as Special Assistant to the Under Secretary of State for Economic, Business and Agricultural Affairs.

Kittrie has testified before various Senate and House committees, and served on a special National Academies of Science committee to make recommendations on preventing nuclear, chemical and biological proliferation. Kittrie’s work has been featured in leading outlets including The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Foreign Affairs, and he has done on-air commentary for networks and stations including NBC, ABC, Fox, PBS, and Al Jazeera. He is also the author of numerous scholarly articles.

Kittrie has been a guest speaker of the International Atomic Energy Agency, NATO, various U.S. federal agencies, the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office, the Belgian Royal Military Academy, and the Royal Military College of Canada. He has also lectured at over a dozen universities including Harvard, Yale, Columbia University, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, King’s College London, and the University of Pennsylvania.

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