Intelligence and International Law: Featuring Professor Asaf Lubin

We invite you to a book talk on Intelligence and International Law Featuring Professor Asaf Lubin, author of "The International Law of Intelligence: The World of Spycraft and the Law of Nations," (Oxford University Press, 2026) in conversation with Professor Matthew Waxman. We will meet on Thursday, February 12th at 12:15 PM in Jerome Greene Hall 106. 

For centuries, states have relied on intelligence collection to navigate uncertainty and avert catastrophe. They spy relentlessly in peacetime and war alike, while simultaneously disavowing the legitimacy of the very conduct on which their security and diplomacy now depends. This enduring tension has generated what may be one of international law’s most vexing questions: is espionage a lawful feature of the international order? Many answers have been offered in the literature, yet the discourse remains impoverished, defaulting to invocations of sovereignty that offer little by way of empirical explanation and even less by way of legal constraint. The result is a growing mismatch between legal theory and the realities of global intelligence governance.
 
The International Law of Intelligence rejects this pretense. It argues that espionage is governed by a distinct legal regime—one shaped by professional norms, moral expectations, and historically rooted patterns of state practice. By tracing how states authorize, conduct, contest, and absorb intelligence operations and spy scandals, the book reconstructs a legal order calibrated to intelligence’s distinctive conditions: informational asymmetry, plausible deniability, and sustained strategic competition. By studying espionage not as an aberration but as a constitutive domain of statecraft, the book offers a framework capable of disciplining intelligence activity without demanding its disappearance. In doing so, it illuminates how international law survives, adapts, and exerts influence in the shadowlands of secret national security decision-making. 

A light lunch will be served. Please RSVP here. If you are no longer able to attend or have any questions, please email [email protected]. It is important that you register or de-register so that we can order the appropriate amount of food.

Event open to admitted Law School students, Law Faculty, and Law Staff. 

Sponsored by CLS National Security Law Program, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, and Columbia Society of International Law