LAW 379 - Financial Sanctions, Anti-Money Laundering, and Countering the Financing of Terrorism

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This course concerns an area of law at the intersection of banking, finance, national security, and foreign policy. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the immediate U.S. response was to impose financial sanctions on selected Russian industries, enterprises, and individuals. This is only the latest example of the use of financial sanctions and other controls on banking and financial services as a tool of national security and foreign policy. The course will briefly outline the history of the legal framework of such measures, from the Trading With the Enemy Act of 1917 to the present. We will discuss the federal government’s powers to use controls on banking and financial services as national security and foreign policy tools, focusing on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the Bank Secrecy Act. We will examine domestic legal challenges to those powers. And we will discuss international legal developments, some of which complement and some of which undercut the U.S. legal framework. A research paper and class participation will determine the course grade.