On January 14, Emory Law hosted a student-engaged discussion on recent U.S. actions involving Venezuela, featuring Professor Laurie Blank and Professor Mark Nevitt. The event examined the domestic and international legal consequences of U.S. military force against vessels identified by U.S. intelligence as linked to Venezuelan drug trafficking and the joint military-law-enforcement operation that resulted in the capture of Nicolás Maduro. Throughout the discussion, both speakers emphasized that the controversy turns on law and facts together, and that disagreement often stems from disputes over both the applicable legal framework and the factual predicates being asserted.
Professor Nevitt opened by taking the audience “back to September of 2025,” focusing on the domestic legal issues surrounding the administration’s actions. He began by acknowledging that the President has constitutional authority as Commander in Chief to defend the nation, but also a constitutional obligation to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, including statutes and treaty law. He explained that the administration’s decision to label certain Venezuelan drug cartels as terrorist organizations was, in itself, “just that, a label,” and did not automatically confer new war-making authority apart from implications under material-support-to-terrorism statutes.
Nevitt highlighted what he described as a significant historical shift. Drugs, he noted, have for decades been treated as a law-enforcement mission primarily conducted by the Coast Guard through maritime interdiction, boarding, and seizure, not through kinetic military force analyzed under the law of armed conflict. Against that backdrop, he described the reported September order to strike a vessel thousands of miles from the United States as a big moment marking a move away from law enforcement toward a war-powers framework. One month later, he noted, the administration publicly asserted that the United States was engaged in a non-international armed conflict with so-called narco-terrorist groups, prompting the threshold question, what were we before that declaration?
A recurring concern, Nevitt emphasized, is that the public still does not know the precise legal authority being claimed because the relevant Office of Legal Counsel opinion, described as the executive branch’s core legal justification, has not been released. Without that opinion, the scope of the asserted NIAC and the reasoning behind it remain unclear. He concluded his opening remarks by stressing that Congress has not authorized force, that the situation relies on a very bold view of Article II powers, and that Congress has largely been absent from the debate despite the War Powers Resolution’s intent to constrain unilateral presidential action.
Professor Blank then shifted the discussion to the international law frameworks, explaining that the situation illustrates why both facts and law matter. She outlined the U.N. Charter system, created to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war by prohibiting the use of force against another state’s territorial integrity or political independence. She explained that there are only three exceptions to that prohibition, consent, U.N. Security Council authorization, and self-defense. Applying those rules, she noted that there is no consent, no Security Council authorization, and serious questions about whether self-defense can plausibly be invoked.
Blank also discussed the prohibition on intervention, which bars coercive interference in a state’s domaine réservé, its core internal affairs including political systems, elections, and control over natural resources. She then turned to the law of armed conflict, explaining the difference between international armed conflict and non-international armed conflict and emphasizing that LOAC applies only once specific legal thresholds such as intensity of violence and organization of armed groups are met. Declaring that a NIAC exists, she stressed, does not make it so, the facts must satisfy the legal criteria.
Student questions drove the remainder of the event. Students pressed both speakers on whether post-9/11 national security thinking, particularly Bush-era doctrines emphasizing preemption, made the current approach less novel. Both professors responded that national security strategy documents articulate policy, not law, and do not themselves create legal authority. They similarly rejected the idea that the Monroe Doctrine supplies independent legal justification, describing it as a worldview or policy framework rather than a source of constitutional or international legal power.
Several questions focused on self-defense and imminence, prompting discussion of the Caroline standard requiring necessity that is instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of peaceful means. Both speakers emphasized that drug trafficking, however devastating its consequences, does not resemble an armed attack as understood in international law, and that layering inference upon inference, particularly when vessels are far from U.S. territory and not moving toward it, raises serious legal concerns. Professor Nevitt underscored that intelligence can be wrong, which is precisely why interdiction has historically been treated as law enforcement rather than warfare.
Students also asked whether consent could be derived from the Venezuelan people rather than the Maduro government. Professor Blank explained that under international law consent to the use of force is vested in the sovereign government, not in a generalized notion of popular will even where legitimacy is contested. Discussion of Panama and Operation Just Cause illustrated how fact-specific and legally contested such arguments can be.
The event concluded with questions about the practical value of international law and the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect. Professor Blank emphasized that international law enables predictability, stability, and functioning relationships between states and that abandoning shared rules makes everyone, including U.S. service members, less safe. On R2P, both speakers stressed that it is a doctrine, not a legal authorization for force, and warned that expanding humanitarian justifications risks dangerous reciprocity, pointing to how similar arguments have been invoked by other states to justify unlawful aggression.
The discussion closed on a sober note. While the humanitarian and security concerns raised by Venezuela are real, the speakers warned that eroding legal constraints on the use of force carries long-term consequences for constitutional governance, international order, and global stability, concerns that will remain pressing beyond this single episode.