Compiled by Sarah Willrich.
Articles
A History of LGBT Officers & the Central Intelligence Agency
Trace Ballard, Julia Curlee, and Todd Johannessen reviewed the history of LGBT exclusion, eventual inclusion, and return to exclusion in the CIA. They highlighted the legal and cultural institutions that made greater acceptance possible and why those same institutions are under threat today.
Observers and historians have been quick to draw parallels between the current moment and the Lavender Scare of the 1950s. The specific mechanisms differ. The authors are unaware of officers being interrogated about sexual orientation, but the campaign to identify, stigmatize, and remove members of a disfavored group from the federal workforce rhymes with that earlier era.
Marriage equality remains the law, and the Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to Obergefell in November 2025. Gay, lesbian, and bisexual officers at the CIA are not, as of this writing, facing a systematic purge, but for transgender officers, the situation is grave, and the broader chilling effect on all LGBT employees and potential recruits is difficult to overstate
An AI Playground for the Courts
Daniel E. Ho and Olivia H. Martin considered how artificial intelligence (AI) could be deployed by courts themselves, not just litigants. While AI models have proved themselves capable at legal analysis, the authors explained the dangers of overreliance on AI-produced analysis, such as hallucinations or scope decisions that drift from the user’s intentions. Ho and Martin argued that the best way forward is a controlled AI “playground” where courts can explore these possibilities while ensuring privacy protections.
In 18 minutes, the agent located the docket (which had a staggering 88,800 comments), devised a search strategy, downloaded and parsed more than 500,000 words (or approximately 1,200 pages) of comments, extracted supporting quotations, and produced a structured memorandum with citations and verifiable pin-citations. The resulting memo was a strikingly useful starting point—although of course incomplete. On careful review of the agent’s approach and tool calls, we saw that it had retrieved only the top 10 results for each search, apparently conserving cost, but potentially missing many relevant comments. Used in practice for similar tasks, a judge evaluating only a polished memorandum might see extraordinary speed and apparent comprehensiveness, but inspection of the agent’s process also reveals the retrieval choices that bounded its answer. For example, the LLM might have arbitrarily decided on a search strategy that queried for “law professors” but not “Sierra Club,” and missed a key, distinct issue raised only by the Sierra Club that for some reason failed other search terms. The judge then might have an incomplete—without knowing necessarily whether or how it is incomplete—sense of the distinct issues raised that may or may not necessitate agency response under the Administrative Procedure Act.
Podcasts
Lawfare Daily: What’s So Special About a Special Grand Jury?: Benjamin Wittes spoke with Anna Bower about how special grand juries work, what federal law actually permits them to do, and why turning one loose to investigate purported crimes can, on occasion, backfire on the prosecution.
Videos and Webinars
Lawfare Live: The Trials of the Trump Administration, August 21: On Friday, August 21, at 4 p.m. ET, Wittes will sit down with Molly Roberts, Bower, and Eric Columbus to discuss updates in the prosecution of Don Lemon, Disney suing the Federal Communications Commission for its order requiring ABC-owned stations to file early license renewals, the Justice Department appealing the dismissal of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s criminal case, and more.
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