Citing the need to prepare the next generation of leaders at a time of profound disruption, Harvard Law School (HLS) has launched the National Security Law and Policy Initiative (NSLPI), a program that gathers scholars, practitioners, and students to help shape the future of national security.
Led by faculty director Kristen E. Eichensehr, the Balthrop Cassidy professor of law, the initiative will organize events, host visiting fellows, and support law school course offerings, drawing on the expertise of HLS faculty affiliates and a bipartisan advisory board of former federal government officials.
The program’s launch on September 9 dovetailed with the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center. Those terrorist acts, Eichensehr said in an interview, were an “an inflection point in the international order [and] in the United States’ conception of itself” that went on to shape national security for the next 20 years. They also marked the only time in NATO’s history that the organization invoked its collective defense provision—Article 5—in support of the U.S.
Today, Eichensehr said, the nation has moved into a different era, with the expansion of executive power in the U.S. and the weakening of international institutions that arose after World War II. In contrast to the unity displayed in the wake of September 11, the U.S. now has a president who has repeatedly threatened to withdraw from NATO and to seize territory from a NATO ally, Denmark. “We’re in a moment where the U.S. Congress was so concerned about the president withdrawing the U.S. from NATO that it passed a provision saying that either the Senate or the full Congress has to consent before that can happen,” she said. While terrorist threats have not abated, “they’re changing, and what the international system looks like is changing.”
One of the main goals of the NSLPI, Eichensehr said, will be to bring together people with divergent views and to “foster bipartisan consensus on some of the ways forward.”
The program’s advisory board, chaired by Jane Harman ’69, a former U.S. representative from California, comprises national security practitioners from both parties and across three branches of the federal government. They include Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security advisor in the Biden administration; Michael Chertoff ’78, the U.S. homeland security secretary under U.S. President George W. Bush; and Courtney Simmons Elwood, the CIA general counsel in the first Trump administration.
Supported with a grant from the Andrew Carnegie Foundation, the NSLPI will focus on two core themes during its first two years: domestic separation of powers and the role of Congress in national security in its first year, and the rebuilding of the international legal order in its second.
This November, the initiative will host its inaugural event, a lecture by the former director of national intelligence Avril Haines, who served in the Biden administration. In the spring of 2027, the program will organize a conference on Congress’s role in national security and welcome its first visiting fellow, Margaret Taylor, a former legal adviser to the U.S. Department of State.
“Harvard Law School has a long tradition of leadership on national security. Its faculty and alumni helped to design the laws and institutions that have undergirded the national and international security system for decades,” Eichensehr said in a press release announcing the program launch. “The initiative positions HLS to help shape the next era of national security by producing actionable reform proposals and training our students as future leaders.”
