The Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law invites you to Cyber-Attacks and Force: Back to the Future of the UN Charter with Matt Waxman, Associate Professor of Law at Columbia University.

Cyber-attacks pose difficult legal issues and the problems can be both novel and familiar. The technology of conflict—both in terms of capabilities and vulnerabilities—is changing in revolutionary ways, but destructive potential is still deliverable with non-military means. Proposals for legal reform should consider the particular features of new modes of conflict that make legal regulation difficult and the way legal interpretations inevitably create strategic winners and losers. Reform can help check new forms of destructive power but only if those legal moves are themselves backed up with evolving power.

Matthew Waxman is an expert in national security law and international law, specializing in the domestic and international legal aspects of combating terrorism and the use of military force. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School. He clerked for Associate Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter and Judge Joel M. Flaum of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Before joining the Columbia faculty, he served in senior positions at the U.S. State Department, Department of Defense and National Security Council. Professor Waxman was a Fulbright Scholar to the United Kingdom and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations where he also serves as Adjunct Senior Fellow for Law & Foreign Policy.