A recent Justice Department request for “emergency powers” in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has civil liberties and anti-surveillance NGOs on heightened alert against opportunistic rollbacks of citizen freedoms.

Worth listening to and reading at this time of precarity is the Columbia Center for Oral History Research’s Rule of Law Oral History Project:

The Rule of Law Oral History Project was initiated in 2008 to explore and document the state of human and civil rights in the post-9/11 world. In its first year, the project conducted a series of interviews with attorneys in order to document legal challenges against capital punishment in the United States. Recognizing important intersections between litigation challenging the administration of capital punishment and the legal architecture of post-9/11 detention policies and practices, the Rule of Law Oral History Project expanded in 2010 to study the statutory and constitutional challenges of the use of the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay.

Select interviews are available online. You can also browse the complete list of interviews in the OHAC online research portal; access to interviews not online will resume once the University reopens.