# Lawfare **The use of legal process as a weapon rather than as a remedy** — filing, prosecuting, investigating or referring in order to impose cost, delay, exposure or fear on an adversary, where winning the case is optional and often beside the point. The word carries two distinct lives that are constantly confused: a **military-legal** term of art about international law in armed conflict, and an **American domestic accusation** hurled at prosecutors and plaintiffs by whoever is currently a defendant. Both lives matter to this knowledge base, but the second is where the work is. In American politics "lawfare" functions as a one-word theory of a prosecution's motive — and it is deployed most heavily by the political faction that has built the largest litigation apparatus of its own. ## Where the word comes from Variants of "lawfare" appear as far back as the 1950s in contexts with nothing to do with national security — divorce practice, courtroom advocacy, colonial administration, even airfare discounts for lawyers. Its **national-security** usage seems to appear first in *Unrestricted Warfare* (1999), a strategy book by two People's Liberation Army officers, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, who used it for a state's exploitation of international legal institutions to achieve strategic ends. The term entered Western vocabulary through a **November 2001 paper by then-Air Force Colonel Charles J. Dunlap Jr.**, "Law and Military Interventions: Preserving Humanitarian Values in 21st Century Conflicts," written for Harvard's Carr Center in the aftermath of the 1999 Kosovo campaign, where legal argument had been unusually central to the conduct of the war. Dunlap asked whether "lawfare" was turning warfare into unfair, defined it as "the use of law as a weapon of war," and called it the newest feature of 21st-century combat. Dunlap later **broadened** the definition — in part to reclaim it from people using it as a slur — to "the strategy of using — or misusing — law as a substitute for traditional military means to achieve an operational objective." That version is deliberately **value-neutral**: building courts in an Afghan province to defeat an insurgency is lawfare in exactly the same sense as filing a strategic war-crimes complaint. Dunlap went on to direct Duke Law School's Center on Law, Ethics and National Security. The *Lawfare* blog — launched **September 1, 2010** by Benjamin Wittes, Robert Chesney and Jack Goldsmith — adopted the word in that neutral sense and in a second, punning one: America has been at war with itself over the law governing its own national security. The site's continued existence is why "lawfare" reads as a serious analytic category to lawyers and as an insult to everyone else. ## The American domestic turn By the 2020s the word had been almost entirely repurposed in U.S. politics, where it names **the claim that a legal proceeding is politics in a robe**. In this usage it belongs to a four-word family that the vault treats as one vocabulary with divided labor: [[Weaponized]] explains the *mechanism*, "two-tiered justice" explains the *pattern*, **lawfare** explains the *strategy*, and "political persecution" explains the *motive*. Applied to the Trump prosecutions, the civil fraud judgment, the classified-documents case and the January 6 prosecutions, "lawfare" converts each individual proceeding into an episode of a campaign. > [!important] The accusation and the practice run in the same direction > The faction that made "lawfare" a household word also built the country's most productive legal-attack infrastructure. The vault already records [[Judicial Watch]] as an opposition-research and lawfare operation whose targets are overwhelmingly Democratic officials; [[Coolidge Reagan Foundation]] as a campaign-finance lawfare shop using tax-deductible [[501(c)(3)]] donations to generate a steady stream of complaints; [[America First Legal]] as a litigation arm built to run immigration, DEI and election cases as a permanent offensive; and [[Judicial Crisis Network]] as the money behind the judges who hear them. Calling a prosecution "lawfare" while operating a lawfare shop is not a contradiction to be resolved — **it is the argument working as designed**, because the word's job is to make legal process itself look partisan, which is only advantageous to a party that prefers the process discredited. The 2025–26 escalation added an official layer to what had been a private-litigation strategy: the criminal **referral as the opening weapon** — a public accusation from an executive-branch official that generates an investigation, which generates a headline, whether or not a charge follows — and, in at least one Justice Department addendum, an explicit prosecution bar reserved under a "Lawfare and/or Weaponization" heading for use on allies but not adversaries. ## How to tell lawfare from litigation The distinction cannot be drawn from the merits, because meritorious suits can be weapons and frivolous suits can be sincere. Four working tests, in rough order of usefulness: 1. **Is the remedy the point?** If the filer would be no worse off losing than winning — because the cost imposed, the discovery obtained, or the press release issued was the deliverable — the suit is a weapon. 2. **Volume over merit.** A shop that files continuously and loses routinely is not incompetent; throughput is the product. 3. **Forum selection as the strategy.** When the choice of judge or district is doing more work than the legal theory, the theory is a vehicle. 4. **Does the filer need a court at all?** A referral, an ethics complaint or a subpoena that generates its consequences before any adjudication is lawfare in its purest form. None of these tests turn on who is filing, which is what makes them usable in a knowledge base that has to record both directions. ## Why It Matters for the KB "Lawfare" is the vault's most-used word without a page — it appears in the prose of roughly seventy pages across People, Concepts, Organizations and Events — and until this page existed the term resolved to [[Weaponized]], a page about a *rhetorical* move. That mattered analytically: weaponization is something the right says is being done to it, while lawfare is something it both alleges and does. Splitting them lets the vault record the accusation and the apparatus on the same map. ## See Also - [[Weaponized]] — the rhetorical family this term used to be filed under - [[Lawfare Timeline]] — the chronology, from Kosovo to the 2026 referrals - [[Conservative Legal Movement]] — the institutions that do the litigating - [[Judicial Watch]] · [[America First Legal]] · [[Coolidge Reagan Foundation]] · [[Judicial Crisis Network]] — the practitioners - [[Elite Impunity]] — the outcome the strategy is meant to produce - [[Habeas Corpus Timeline]] — where the strategy meets the writ that tests detention