City Bar Warns of Restrictions on Trump’s Power to Attack North Korea (New York Law Journal)
New York Law Journal, October 10, 2017
City Bar Warns of Restrictions on Trump’s Power to Attack North Korea
“The New York City Bar Association has sent an open letter to President Donald Trump on Tuesday seeking to call his ‘urgent attention’ to various legal restrictions on his power to start a war with North Korea. ‘[I] call your urgent attention to the requirements of the U.S. Constitution, federal legislation and international law … and, in particular, to the strict limits our constitution and laws impose on the power of our president to unilaterally commit the nation to war,” Bar Association President John Kiernan wrote. Kiernan noted that the letter was being sent to the White House on behalf of the Bar Association’s 25,000 members, who hail from nearly every U.S. state. The 10-paragraph letter, which was sent last week and was cc’d to cabinet members and U.S. Senate and House leaders, went on to say, ‘In the absence of an actual or imminent attack on the United States (or in some circumstances on its allies), the president has no authority to commence a war in ‘anticipatory self-defense’ (sometimes incorrectly called a ‘preemptive’ war) on another nation without prior congressional approval.'”
