I greatly appreciate Tanisha Fazal’s thoughtful comments on my book. Over the years I have wrestled with many of the questions that she raises.

Plausible Legality seeks to explain the role of law in constraining state violence. Focusing on the United States, I argue that even after societies institutionalize human rights and humanitarian law, national security legal cultures produce varying justifications for abusive practices, thus shaping law’s impact on policy. As the book emphasizes, racial animus has frequently underlined repertoires of violence––overtly in cultures of exception and more implicitly in the culture of legal rationalization that has predominated in post-9/11 America. Do these shifting justifications really matter for victims, asks Fazal? I think that they do, not because plausibly legal enhanced interrogation techniques and targeted killing are an ethical or humanitarian improvement on openly racist or blatantly extrajudicial mutilation and murder, but because identifying how authorities violate, evade, and reinterpret law in differing contexts better positions human rights advocates to effectively push back against state violence.

Fazal is right to note that the drivers of cultural change are not the primary focus of the book, nor can the type of broad patterns I identify be explained by a single variable. Rather, I suggest that a conjunction of critical historical events, broader shifts in social norms, and the preferences of political actors accounts for changing legal cultures. For instance, the intelligence scandals of the 1970s and 1980s and resultant media, nongovernmental organization, and political scrutiny made a culture of secrecy and plausible deniability unsustainable. As a result, the national security establishment became increasingly risk averse, learning to seek legal cover. In contrast, the Trump administration’s crude extralegalism signals a failure to appreciate the efficacy of plausible legality as an exculpatory tactic, but also builds on impunity for abuses in the global War on Terror. If waterboarding is legal, why not “a hell of a lot worse”? In this sense, there is a cumulative, though not necessarily progressive aspect, to cultural change.

I agree with Fazal that there is more to be learned about the primary protagonists in my story. Legal cultures form through the patterned actions of individual agents, each with his or her own educational, ideological, and organizational backgrounds. Who collaborates with and who resists authorizing human rights abuses is a crucial question that requires ongoing attention. I also appreciate Fazal’s challenge to further specify the role of audiences. While invocations of exception often appeal directly to the mob, both mobilizing and horrifying the public, plausible legality seeks first and foremost the acquiescence of judicial and political elites who have the institutional power to trigger the type of investigations and recriminations besieging the current administration.

In many ways, my argument is aligned with Fazal’s finding that states attempt to evade the proliferation of legal constraints, although the mechanisms for doing so vary in our accounts. Like her, I hold out hope that law can limit violence, but only if we better understand how and why actors respect and reject their legal obligations.