The evolution of presidential power after 9/11

Ashley Deeks, a Miller Center faculty senior fellow, is vice dean and the Class of 1948 Professor of Scholarly Research in Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. Her primary research and teaching interests are international law, national security, intelligence, and the laws of war. She wrote The Double Black Box: National Security, Artificial Intelligence, and the Struggle for Democratic Accountability and has written articles on the use of force, executive power, secret treaties, the intersection of national security and international law, and the laws of armed conflict. She is a member of the State Department’s Advisory Committee on International Law, a senior fellow at the Lieber Institute for Law and Land Warfare, and a senior contributor to Lawfare. Deeks served in the Biden administration as White House associate counsel and deputy legal advisor to the National Security Council.

Ambassador Douglas Lute is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general and the chair of BGR’s International and Trade and Defense and Critical Technologies Practices. During his distinguished military career, he served as Joint Staff director of operations overseeing U.S. military operations worldwide, as U.S. Central Command director of operations in the Middle East, as a NATO commander for several tours, and in combat during Operation Desert Storm. Lute also served six years in the White House under two presidents: as deputy national security advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan under George W. Bush and as South Asia coordinator and U.S. ambassador to NATO under Barack Obama. He graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and holds an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Russell L. Riley is the Miller Center’s White Burkett Miller Center Professor of Ethics and Institutions and co-directs the Presidential Oral History Program. He is one of the nation’s foremost authorities on elite oral history interviewing and the contemporary presidency. He has logged more than 1,500 hours of confidential interviews with senior members of the White House staff, Cabinet officers, and foreign leaders back to the days of the Carter and Reagan administrations. His most recent book is Inside the George W. Bush White House: An Oral History (Oxford University Press, 2026). Riley holds a BS from Auburn University and an MA and PhD from the University of Virginia.

William J. Antholis has served as director and CEO of UVA’s Miller Center of Public Affairs since January 2015. In that time, the Miller Center has strengthened its position as the leading nonpartisan research institution on the American presidency and worked with scholars across the University of Virginia to deliver vital research to policymakers and the public. Before coming to the Miller Center, Antholis served as managing director at the Brookings Institution from 2004 to 2014, working directly with Brookings’s president and vice presidents. He also served at the U.S. Department of State and National Security Council. Antholis is the author of two books and dozens of articles on U.S. politics, U.S. foreign policy, international organizations, the G8, climate change, and trade. He holds a BA from UVA and a PhD from Yale University.