Preparing the next generation of national security lawyers for the challenges they cannot learn from a textbook.
The National Security Crisis Law: Edge Technologies Simulation is Georgetown Law’s immersive capstone experience in national security law. Developed and led by Professor Laura K. Donohue, Faculty Director at Center on National Security, the Simulation places students inside a rapidly evolving national security crisis and challenges them to apply law, exercise professional judgment, and advise senior decision-makers under the same pressures that shape real-world national security practice.
Students do not simply study how the national security process works. They become part of it.
The 2026 Simulation
On March 13–14, 2026, 18 Georgetown Law students assumed senior roles across the national security establishment, including leadership positions at the Department of Defense, CIA, FBI, NSA, and other agencies.
Over two intensive days, they confronted a cascading series of fictional crises involving attacks on U.S. satellites and telecommunications infrastructure, emerging technologies, and domestic security threats. Students had to determine what information they could trust, identify applicable legal authorities, weigh competing policy options, brief senior officials, navigate the interagency process, and make consequential decisions with incomplete information and limited time.
The exercise was the culmination of a semester-long course taught by Center on National Security Director Professor Laura K. Donohue. The 2026 iteration marked a major evolution of a simulation first launched at Georgetown Law during the 2009–10 academic year, incorporating contemporary challenges involving artificial intelligence, satellite and sensor technologies, virtual reality, cryptocurrencies, advanced weaponry, communications networks, and other emerging technologies. Read more about the 2026 Simulation here.
By the Numbers
18 Georgetown Law students
Control team of approximately 30 national security practitioners and academic supported by 3 JD student research assistants
2 days of intensive, in-person crisis response
421 pages of detailed scenarios, legal authorities, threats, and storylines
Control team handbook authored by Professor Laura K. Donohue with input from her research assistants and core control team member.
Learning National Security Law by Practicing It
The Simulation is designed to bridge the gap between knowing the law and practicing it.
Students must master constitutional, statutory, regulatory, and international legal authorities — but the exercise goes much further. They learn to provide legal advice when facts are uncertain, time is short, institutional interests conflict, and decision-makers need answers.
Students practice how to:
- Apply legal authorities to rapidly evolving real-world problems;
- Make decisions and provide advice with incomplete or conflicting information;
- Navigate National Security Council and interagency processes;
- Brief senior government officials and communicate complex legal advice clearly;
- Identify and counter cognitive biases and challenging group dynamics;
- Exercise leadership and professional judgment under pressure;
- Separate essential intelligence from distracting or irrelevant information; and
- Evaluate their own performance and incorporate feedback from experienced practitioners.
As Professor Donohue explains, the Simulation pushes students beyond traditional legal education: students must understand not only constitutional, statutory, and regulatory provisions, but also the legal, political, and institutional processes through which national security decisions are actually made.
An Immersive National Security Environment
The Simulation is built to recreate the complexity and constraints of national security decision-making.
Students receive rapidly changing intelligence and developments through simulation-specific communications systems, tablets, an AP-style news wire, a bespoke Video News Network (VNN), and a fictional online forum. Presidential briefings and National Security Council meetings follow real-world protocols, including restrictions on electronics.
Students also encounter emerging technologies directly. The 2026 Simulation included Global Heroes, a custom virtual-reality experience developed specifically for the exercise and integrated into one of its storylines.
Behind the scenes, a Control Team of approximately 30 national security practitioners and academics serves as the Simulation’s “collective brain.” Control Team members respond in real time to student requests and decisions, assume the roles of outside actors, and continually adapt the exercise based on student actions.
The result is an environment in which there is no answer key. Every decision can change what happens next.
Connecting Students With the National Security Community
The Simulation draws on Georgetown Law’s location in Washington, D.C. and its deep network of national security practitioners and alumni.
The 2026 Control Team brought together experts with experience across the federal government, military institutions, academia, U.S. Attorney’s Offices, and the private sector. Many were Georgetown alumni, including former Simulation participants who returned to help train the next generation of national security lawyers.
That interaction is central to the experience. Students receive direct exposure to practitioners who have confronted the kinds of institutional, legal, and professional challenges recreated in the Simulation. At the conclusion of the exercise, experienced judges provide detailed feedback on student performance, followed by further debriefing and reflection.
What Students Take Away
For participants, the Simulation can fundamentally change how they understand the role of a national security lawyer.
“In my professional career, I have not experienced a more challenging, realistic exercise designed to enhance the hard and soft skills of national security lawyering. More than a class, the simulation is a testing lab transforming students into national security practitioners.”
Chris Marshall, L’26
Caroline Moffatt, F’21, L’26, described leaving the exercise with “a much sharper instinct for how to structure legal analysis” after confronting the tension between decisive action and the legal and institutional constraints that give government decisions legitimacy.
For Sam Guerrero, L’27, the Simulation offered opportunities to practice media interviews, brief senior officials, participate in interagency coordination, identify his own strengths and weaknesses, and receive feedback from experienced national security practitioners.
An Investment in the Future of National Security Law
Producing an exercise at this level requires extensive preparation, technology, research, practitioner participation, and institutional support.
That investment creates something difficult to replicate in a traditional classroom: a setting in which future lawyers can make difficult decisions, experience their consequences, receive expert feedback, and improve — before they are called upon to do so in government or practice.
The Simulation also serves as a platform for innovation in legal education. Since its launch during the 2009–10 academic year, it has grown from a Georgetown Law tabletop exercise into a program that, before its hiatus, involved approximately 300 participants from a dozen law schools. The redesigned Edge Technologies Simulation creates new opportunities to expand its reach and respond to the rapidly changing technological and legal landscape.
For students, it is an opportunity to discover what national security practice actually demands.
For practitioners and alumni, it is an opportunity to help prepare those who will follow them.
And for supporters of the Center on National Security, it is an investment in a model of legal education designed for the national security challenges of the future.