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This thesis examines how United States federal courts can review the President's exercise of the war powers to detain American citizens, or non-citizens having similar rights, as unlawful combatants. It argues that the separation of powers doctrine, based on Lockean principles, permits probing judicial review of such an executive detention, where the President exercises the war powers in a way that effectively adjudicates individual rights or impacts upon domestic affairs. / The constitutional controversy over unlawful combatant detentions is fundamentally a separation of powers problem. Existing functionalist and formalist theories about the separation doctrine, as well as dichotomous debates about individual rights versus national security, fail to reconcile judicial deference to executive decisions in some war powers cases with closer scrutiny in others. This thesis therefore proposes a new separation of powers theory that explains the existing war powers jurisprudence, while establishing principles upon which courts can vigorously review future executive war powers decisions that interfere with individual rights or impact upon domestic matters, such as with the detention of a citizen as an alleged unlawful combatant. / The thesis first sets out a separation of powers theory based on the political thought of John Locke, placing upon each branch a fiduciary duty to make decisions only in ways best calculated to serve the public good. The "deliberative processes" approach to the separation doctrine, growing out of this fiduciary duty, functionally distributes constitutional power among the branches depending upon which one is most institutionally suited to resolve the matter at hand. Judicial application of the political question doctrine in past war powers cases demonstrates such a Lockean deliberative processes analysis, in the ways that courts have questioned judicial competency to scrutinize the executive's strategic military decisions. Cases dealing specifically with unlawful combatant detentions, in turn, show that judicial competence to review executive military decisions increases when the President functionally adjudicates individual rights of the citizen, a deliberative process for which the courts are more institutionally competent. Accordingly, this thesis concludes that courts can review executive unlawful combatant detentions under adjudicative standards of legality, procedural fairness, and reasonableness.