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The Constitution of Empire offers a constitutional and historical survey of American territorial expansion from the founding era to the present day. The authors describe the Constitution's design for territorial acquisition and governance and examine the ways in which practice over the past two hundred years has diverged from that original vision.Noting that most of America's territorial acquisitions—including the Louisiana Purchase, the Alaska Purchase, and the territory acquired after the Mexican-American and Spanish-American Wars—resulted from treaties, the authors elaborate a Jeffersonian-based theory of the federal treaty power and assess American territorial acquisitions from this perspective. They find that at least one American acquisition of territory and many of the basic institutions of territorial governance have no constitutional foundation, and they explore the often-strange paths that constitutional law has traveled to permit such deviations from the Constitution's original meaning

In recent years the use of private military contractors to execute national security tasks in the U.S. military has finally come under public scrutiny. The main policy question is in three parts: What is the proper division of labor between the public and private sectors? Who decides which sector performs a specific task? If private operatives perform tasks that typically fall on the public side (combat, interrogation), what is the public oversight over the private actors, and how can they be held accountable for wrongdoings? In this article these questions are addressed in relation to the privatization process in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). The article has four parts: the first suggests that the Israeli baseline is unique as the IDF has historically been entrusted with a wide array of national-civilian missions; the second explains the economic realities that probably lie behind the privatization efforts; the third describes the slow and cautious privatization process currently under way; the fourth suggests that while there is little public debate, there is civilian oversight, there are some publicly exposed rationales, and there is public support in letting the IDF, the most trusted part of the executive branch, control the process.