On Monday afternoon, Attorney General Eric Holder appeared before law students and faculty at Northwestern University in Chicago to deliver a speech widely billed as a definitive statement about the law governing drone warfare. The speech had been anticipated for some time, thanks in part to Charlie Savage of the New York Times, who revealed in October the existence of a nearly fifty-page memorandum that David Barron and Martin Lederman, two academics then in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, had prepared justifying a White House decision to kill Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who resided in Yemen. . . .