Jack Goldsmith is a co-founder of Lawfare and the Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard Law School (Source: lawfaremedia.org). He co-founded Lawfare in 2010 with Benjamin Wittes and Robert Chesney (Source: law.utexas.edu).
Goldsmith served as Assistant Attorney General heading the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel in 2003–2004 during the George W. Bush administration, an experience he recounted in The Terror Presidency. His scholarship addresses national-security law, internet governance, and the separation of powers. He was a senior fellow (adjunct) at the Hoover Institution (Source: hoover.org); as of September 2026 he describes himself as a non-resident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (Source: jackgoldsmith.org). His work and Lawfare's coverage intersect with AI policy on questions of executive power, surveillance, and the governance of emerging national-security technologies.
Background
Goldsmith holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, a B.A. and M.A. from Oxford University, and a B.A. from Washington and Lee University. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson of the Court of Appeals, and Judge George Aldrich of the Iran–U.S. Claims Tribunal. He taught at the University of Virginia School of Law from 1994 to 1997 and at the University of Chicago Law School from 1997 to 2002. He was special counsel to the general counsel of the Department of Defense from September 2002 to June 2003, and headed the Office of Legal Counsel from October 2003 to July 2004 before joining the Harvard faculty (Source: hls.harvard.edu).
Writing
Goldsmith is the author or co-author of seven books and three casebooks, and co-founded and writes for the newsletter Executive Functions as well as Lawfare (Source: jackgoldsmith.org). His books include The Limits of International Law (with Eric Posner, 2005), The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration (2007), Power and Constraint: The Accountable Presidency After 9/11 (2012), After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency, and In Hoffa's Shadow (Source: hls.harvard.edu). His writing in 2025 and 2026 concentrated on presidential power, war powers, government lawyering and the Supreme Court, including analyses of Trump v. United States and of the War Powers Resolution in relation to Iran (Source: jackgoldsmith.org).
Citation in AI governance literature
Goldsmith's internet-law scholarship is cited in work on AI governance. Anu Bradford's Digital Empires describes his 1998 article "Against Cyberanarchy" (University of Chicago Law Review) as an early critique of the view that the internet by its nature resists regulation, one that rejects the argument that cyberspace activity is fundamentally different from offline activity. Bradford also cites Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World (2006), co-written with Tim Wu, for the argument that governments retain coercive authority over technology firms (Digital Empires — Anu Bradford (2023)). She further draws on Goldsmith's 2018 essay "The Failure of Internet Freedom" (Knight First Amendment Institute), both for his reduction of the US internet-freedom agenda to a commercial non-regulation principle and an anti-censorship principle, and for his account of European officials viewing the dominance of US internet firms as a danger to the European way of life (Digital Empires — Anu Bradford (2023)). A 2024 RAND report by Michael J. D. Vermeer cites "Against Cyberanarchy" for the observation that governments exerted control over the internet through the physical assets that mediate it, and applies the point to AI: governments can likely find some physical asset to serve as a locus of control, though this may fail if dangerous models can be built on general-purpose hardware (Historical Analogues That Can Inform AI Governance — Michael J. D. Vermeer (RAND, 2024)).
His executive-branch writing is cited in the 2025 Fordham Law Review article on law-following AI, which quotes his September 2024 Lawfare analysis of Trump v. United States for the point that the threat of criminal sanction for subordinates is a strong check on executive-branch officials, and cites The Terror Presidency on the president's authority, usually delegated to the Office of Legal Counsel, to issue legal interpretations binding on the executive branch (Law-Following AI: Designing AI Agents to Obey Human Laws (O'Keefe, Ramakrishnan, Tay & Winter, 2025)). Goldsmith also provided a published endorsement for Mustafa Suleyman's The Coming Wave (2023), describing it as a map of the governance and national-security challenges posed by AI and synthetic biology (The Coming Wave — Suleyman and Bhaskar (2023)).
Relationships
- related: Lawfare — publication he co-founded.
- related: Benjamin Wittes, Robert Chesney — Lawfare co-founders.
- supports: Historical Analogues That Can Inform AI Governance — Michael J. D. Vermeer (RAND, 2024), Law-Following AI: Designing AI Agents to Obey Human Laws (O'Keefe, Ramakrishnan, Tay & Winter, 2025) — his scholarship is cited as authority
- related: Digital Empires — Anu Bradford (2023), Anu Bradford — internet-governance scholarship cited in Digital Empires
- related: The Coming Wave — Suleyman and Bhaskar (2023) — published endorsement