The Church Committee and Contemporary Surveillance
Russell A. Miller
Washington and Lee School of Law
Russell Miller teaches and researches in the fields of constitutional law, international law, comparative law theory and methods, and German law and legal culture. He is the author or editor of several books on international law, constitutional law, comparative law theory and methods, and German law and legal culture, including: Constitutional Places – Landmarks on the Road to German Democracy (Kunth 2025); An Introduction to German Law and Legal Culture (CUP 2024); Privacy and Power: A Transatlantic Dialogue in the Shadow of the NSA-Affair (CUP 2017); The Constitutional Jurisprudence of the Federal Republic of Germany (Duke 2012); Progress in International Law (Brill 2008); and Transboundary Harm in International Law: Lessons from the Trail Smelter Arbitration (CUP 2006). His articles and commentary have appeared in respected journals and in the international media. Miller is a two-time Fulbright Senior Research Fellow. In 2021 he was awarded a Humboldt Research Prize in recognition of his research on German law and his contributions to transatlantic understanding. Miller is the co-founder of the German Law Journal and the Berlin-based Rule of Law Academy. From 2020-2022, Miller served as the head of the Max Planck Law Network, a consortium of ten world-class research institutes involving more than twenty research directors and more than 400 PhD candidates, post-doctoral reserachers, and guest researchers. He has been a regular visiting fellow at universities and research institutes in Germany, including the Max Planck Institute for Public International Law (Heidelberg), the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the University of Münster, and the University of Freiburg. He served as a law clerk at the German Federal Constitutional Court and for Judge Robert H. Whaley of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington. Miller has degrees from Washington State University (BA 1991), Duke University (MA and JD 1994) and the University of Frankfurt (2002). He was a DAAD/AGI Research Fellow in 2015.
Recently, AGI Non-Resident Fellow, Dr. Russell A. Miller, detailed the “1975 Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities” and its implications for contemporary surveillance in a lecture at his home Washington and Lee University School of Law. The full text is posted at Verfassungsblog.
Prompting an in-depth interview with Der Spiegel, this lecture drew on the so-called (Senator Frank) Church Committee to conclude that “the United States has become a thoroughgoing and unapologetic security state” and emphasized the legislative, rather than jurisprudential, source of this state of affairs. Moreover, he notes that the security state is a rough majority consensus among Americans, who predictably enforce their preferences through democratic channels. Freedom of the Press represents one of the few loci of critical perspective, which sometimes prompt reform of government.
Dr. Miller last spoke at AGI, alongside partner institutions the Goethe-Institut, the German Embassy-Cultural Division, and the Robert Bosch Foundation Alumni Association, this past April for a panel discussion on his 2012 book, co-authored with Dr. Donald Kommers and titled The Constitutional Jurisprudence of the Federal Republic of Germany.
He also gave a lecture at the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe last week. With the permission of the author, we’ve included this transcript, which originally appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Friday, 12 July.
