Law school reading group reflects on the legacy of the war on terror

In the wake of student protests surrounding the Israel-Gaza war, students and faculty at Stanford Law School (SLS) have launched a series of initiatives addressing the war on terror and its connections to today’s Gaza Strip.

On April 27, SLS held its annual Shaking the Foundations conference, which included a panel discussion on the harms of the War on Terror and a keynote address by a former Guantanamo Bay detention camp prisoner. Shafeen Pittal JD ’24 also initiated a reading group on the War on Terror, which was attended by professors and about 20 students.

Panel discussion on the war on terror

The national security apparatus created by the war on terror has had a significant impact on the situation in Palestine today, three lawyers said at the conference’s panel discussion on the topic “How did we get here? The war on terror: past and present damage.”

Wadie Said, a professor at the University of Colorado School of Law, analyzed the consequences of the war on terror from a criminal justice perspective. Before 9/11, Said said, terrorist attacks were treated similarly to other crimes, without racial profiling or the use of classified evidence. After the war on terror, however, these principles were abandoned, Said said.

“What happens when you declare war?” Said asked. “The use of some powers to enforce immigration laws (now) also comes into the area of ​​national security.”

Said pointed to the increasing use of informants and racial profiling under the guise of national security. Arab, Muslim and Palestinian communities have been disproportionately targeted for attacks and stigmatization.

Zoha Khalili, a lawyer at Palestine Legal, said the United States’ designation of some groups as “terrorists” often contributes to human rights abuses and hinders peaceful, progressive social movements.

“The label terrorism can be used to describe a range of acts that can be so far removed from reality that you don’t really have to think about standard principles, you don’t really have to think about humanity, but you don’t have to think about proportionality either,” said Zahra Billoo, executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) in the San Francisco Bay Area. These acts include torture and ethnic imprisonment, starvation and the destruction of hospitals and schools, Billoo added.

Law enforcement appears to treat Muslims and Arabs as “terrorists until proven innocent,” Billoo said. Billoo told the story of Yasser Affifi, a young Muslim who was pursued by the FBI without a warrant. CAIR helped him win a victory in the Supreme Court, confirming that the practice violated his Fourth Amendment rights.

Billoo called on future lawyers in the audience to take action. They are the “legal arm of the movement” and have the power to protect those who protest peacefully, she said.

Students initiate a reading group on the topic “War on Terror”

Pittal founded the War on Terror reading group in April to raise awareness about the war’s modern-day consequences. The group has since held three reading sessions led by SLS professors. She emphasizes that both the Shaking the Foundations conference and her reading group reflect on how national policies discriminate against various Muslim communities.

“The point of the reading group was really to raise awareness of (the consequences of the war on terror) and to think about our role as law students in helping not only the victims of the war on terror, but also the apparatus and legal doctrine that made it possible,” Pittal said.

For participant Lauren Courtney JD ’25, the reading group was a unique opportunity to discuss social justice in small groups with law professors.

“It’s a perfect combination of a scholarly discussion of how academics have thought about these issues and conceptualized them in a legal context, but also lived human experiences and the real-world consequences the law has had,” Courtney said of the reading group.

Both Pittal and Courtney attended the Shaking the Foundations conference and said it expanded on the knowledge they learned in the reading sessions. For Courtney, the conference highlighted the damage many lawyers had done in the post-9/11 era, but also reminded her that lawyers have the ability to create positive change.

The reading group offered a different perspective than the one SLS classes discuss about the war on terror. Through the group’s meetings, Courtney realized that law classes should more thoroughly elaborate on the consequences of legal scenarios related to the war, rather than just mentioning them in a footnote.

Courtney hopes to work as a public defender after graduation, and the reading group reminded her of her responsibility to understand how the law can be distorted when representing her clients.

For Pittal, the hardest part of studying law was realizing that many innocent victims are still suffering the consequences of the war on terror twenty years later, while public attention has shifted to more current legal issues.

“Who is going to take care of those who have now become invisible?” asked Pittal. “We as a legal community have simply moved on without really confronting what has happened.”