Law Commons^™

Curtiss-Wright Comes Home: Executive Power And National Security Secrecy, Harold Edgar, Benno C. Schmidt Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

Collectively we face no greater challenge than maintaining sensible perspectives on national security issues. Central to this task is the need to achieve a tolerable balance between secrecy and openness in public debate on such issues. There are real threats to our nation, and we would be foolish to ignore them; history teaches that no culture is guaranteed survival. Yet, how to respond to such threats must be profoundly controversial. The virtue of liberal society is that it values highly the realization of private preferences; the sacrifice of those desires to attain another's vision of collective security will never be …