Philip Bobbitt is the Herbert Wechsler Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the Center for National Security at Columbia Law School. He is also a senior fellow at the Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas. He is the author of seven books, of which Terror and Consent:The Wars for the 21st Century (Knopf, 2008) is the most recent. He has served in various capacities in government, including posts at the White House (associate counsel to president), the Senate (legal counsel to the Iran-Contra Committee), the State Department (the counselor on international law), and the National Security Council (director for intelligence programs, senior director for critical infrastructure, and senior director for strategic planning). He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He lives in New York, Austin, and London.

Stephen D. Krasner is the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations at Stanford University, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He was director of the policy planning staff at the Department of State (2005–7), director for governance and development at the National Security Council (2002). In 2003–4 he was deputy director of the Freeman Spogli Institute and director of the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at the institute, as well as a member of the board of directors of the United States Institute of Peace. He received his B.A. from Cornell, M.A. from Columbia, and Ph.D. from Harvard. He is the author of Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton: 1999), several other books, and more than eighty articles. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Matthew Waxman is a professor of law at Columbia Law School and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He previously served as principal deputy director of policy planning (2005–7) and acting director of policy planning (2007) at the US Department of State. He also served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs (2004–5), director for contingency planning and international justice at the National Security Council (2002–3), and special assistant to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice (2001–2). He is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School. He served as law clerk to Supreme Court justice David H. Souter and US Court of Appeals judge Joel M. Flaum. His publications include The Dynamics of Coercion: American Foreign Policy and the Limits of Military Might (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Benjamin Wittes is a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and codirector of the Harvard Law School–Brookings Project on Law and Security. He is the author of Detention and Denial: The Case for Candor after Guantanamo and the cofounder of the Lawfare blog.