Noah Feldman

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: After the initial shock from the college admissions cheating scandal passes, university administrators will have to face the unenviable problem of whether to throw out the students who got in under false pretenses. You might think the solution is simple: If the parents cheated, the kids should pay the price. But things are a little more complicated, at least from the standpoint of the universities.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The indictment of Paul Manafort by New York state prosecutors on Wednesday is a shot across the bow of the presidency — a warning and possible harbinger of future prosecutions of Donald Trump’s associates, children and even the man himself by the state.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Look beyond the juicy stories of rich people and celebrities paying to have their children cheat on the ACT and SAT exams and buying their way into college. The real scandal behind the admissions indictments unveiled Tuesday is the way universities — including some of the greatest on earth — hand off to athletic coaches the power to decide who can attend.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Whatever Huawei Technologies Co. is doing by suing the U.S. government and six cabinet officials, it isn’t trying to win in court. The legal arguments mounted in its brief aren’t based on existing precedent. Although the brief cites the Constitution, as written the arguments are barely legal at all.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: One of the fiercest political flashpoints today is whether to take down old memorials that offend current sensibilities. The U.S. Supreme Court is now considering what to do about that very problem. The case involves a World War I memorial in the form of a 40-foot cross, not a statue of a Confederate soldier. There’s a constitutional dimension because of the potential for establishment of religion. But the issues are nevertheless very much similar.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: President Donald Trump has indicated that he may not want to comply with a series of 81 requests sent by the House Judiciary Committee as part of a strategy of full-on investigation of the president and his associates. His reaction is understandable, but his ability to resist is much more limited than he seems to think. If the House committee issues subpoenas, as opposed to simple requests, the addressees will have a duty to comply unless the information falls within the zone of a legally recognized privilege. And the relevant possibilities, executive privilege and attorney-client privilege, don’t apply widely.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Impeachment investigation without actual impeachment: That’s the strategy House Democrats have unveiled for taking on Donald Trump for the 20 months until the 2020 presidential elections. The Michael Cohen hearings last week were, apparently, just the first salvo. On Monday, the House Judiciary Committee requested documents from 81 agencies, organizations and individuals connected to the president. The committee under Chairman Jerrold Nadler is preparing to leave no stone in Trump’s life unturned. This investigative barrage solves a political problem for the Democrats, namely the danger that impeaching Trump would not lead to his being removed by the Senate and might instead help him win re-election, by energizing his supporters.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Free speech on campus is crucially important in a free society, and in some ways under significant threat. But President Donald Trump’s proposal over the weekend to impose free speech on universities isn’t the answer. Rather, any effort from the White House to control campus speech would become part of the problem. Public universities are already bound by the First Amendment. And private ones have their own free speech and free association rights, which presidential intervention would potentially violate. It’s essential to understand that freedom of speech on a university campus isn’t the same as speech in a pure public forum, like on a street corner.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Ordinarily it’s bad for democracy when a sitting head of government is notified that he will face corruption charges. But the pending indictment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the height of an Israeli election season is actually a good thing for the rule of law. ... What’s good about the charges is that they demonstrate that Israel’s governing institutions are robust enough to enforce the criminal laws of the country, even in the face of tremendous political pressure from the country’s longest-serving leader.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: If you’re looking for the most important sentence in Michael Cohen’s testimony Wednesday to the House Oversight and Reform Committee, here it is: “Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress. That’s not how he operates.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: A federal district court in Houston has held that because women are now permitted to serve in combat roles in the U.S. military, all women must be obligated to register for the draft, just as men do. This might sound like a straightforward win for feminism, especially from the perspective of the old-fashioned legal-equality feminism championed by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, both as an advocate and as a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Yet the court’s decision raises the more complicated question of whether women should simply be offered access to traditionally male roles in the military, like combat positions, or whether they should be forced to assume those jobs.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: One word holds the key to the major Trump-related court cases that you’ll be hearing a lot about in the next few months: deference. In the lawsuits against President Donald Trump’s border wall, and in the U.S. Supreme Court case over whether the census will include a question about citizenship, a central issue will be whether the courts should defer to the assertions that the Trump administration says provide a basis for the decisions they’ve taken.

Hosted by June Grasso. Guests: Retired Navy Admiral James Stavridis, former military commander of NATO, and Bloomberg Opinion columnist: "Trump Is Risking an ISIS Resurrection." Clive Crook, Bloomberg Opinion editor: "Trump Is Rooting for Ocasio-Cortez’s Democrats." Noah Smith, Bloomberg Opinion columnist: "Design a Green New Deal That Isn’t Over the Top." Noah Feldman, Harvard Law Professor and Bloomberg Opinion columnist: "Kavanaugh Shows How Conservative He Is on Abortion."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman; President Donald Trump can’t just pull funding for high-speed rail from California as payback for the state’s challenging the constitutionality of his border wall. There are laws governing decisions by agencies like the Department of Transportation. Those laws require that agencies give principled policy reasons for their actions — not recite doubtful pretexts for decisions taken on political grounds. If the Transportation Department actually pulls the funding, as it has said it plans to do, California will challenge the decision in court. And the odds are pretty high that the state will win, regardless of what happens in the separate legal challenge to the border wall.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Justice Clarence Thomas wants to get medieval with the First Amendment. In a fascinating and bizarre opinion issued Tuesday, Thomas invoked the original meaning of the Constitution and the 18th-century common law of libel to assault a landmark freedom-of-the-press decision, New York Times v. Sullivan. Thomas’s foray won’t become the law in the immediate future. He wrote the solo opinion as the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case of one of Bill Cosby’s accusers, who sought to bring a defamation claim against the comedian and convicted sex offender. But it’s important as a sign of the times because it reflects distrust of the news media.  

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: In retrospect, it seems obvious that President Donald Trump would want to have his cake and eat it, too. That’s essentially what he’s doing Friday by both signing a government funding bill that provides $1.375 billion for a barrier with Mexico and also declaring a national emergency to allocate other federal funds for the same purpose.

Legal challenges to President Trump’s planned national-emergency declaration to build a border wall are likely to come fast and furious — but legal experts caution the law is “murky” on the extent of his powers. ... Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman said the Constitution is intentionally “murky” on what constitutes a national emergency and what powers the president has during one. “A lot of these laws are not super clear and that gives a lot of space to the president,” Feldman said.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: President Donald Trump is reportedly close to issuing an executive order that would ban Chinese companies like Huawei Technologies Co. from building 5G wireless networks in the U.S. The significance of such an order goes beyond its obvious implications for American telecommunications companies.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The trial of a dozen leading Catalan politicians in Madrid on charges of rebellion isn’t something you expect to see in a functioning European democracy. The events of fall 2017 weren’t a rebellion in the ordinary sense of the word. It was nonviolent political grandstanding that the Spanish state easily shut down. The effort shouldn’t have succeeded, but it also shouldn’t be harshly criminalized.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: By a 5-4 vote Thursday night, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked a Louisiana law that would have made abortion all but impossible in the state — at least until the court can hear the merits of the case. The most important fact about this result is that Chief Justice John Roberts cast the deciding vote to stop the law from taking effect. That doesn’t tell you how he’ll ultimately vote on whether the law is constitutional. But it does tell you that Roberts cares about a fair process.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman:  The U.S. Senate passed a bill Tuesday that says state governments can refuse to do business with companies that boycott Israel. The bill passed, 77-23, with 22 Democrats and Republican Rand Paul maintaining that it threatens free-speech rights. So you might be wondering, as I was: Is the bill actually unconstitutional? The question is straightforward, but the answer isn’t — because of the strange way that the federal bill is written with regard to the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.  The bill essentially declares that, if states want to pass measures targeting companies that boycott Israel, nothing in federal law prohibits the states from doing that. The strange thing is that no one really seems to think that the state laws violate any federal statute.