Noah Feldman

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The key revelation of Michael Cohen’s new guilty plea is this: Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller is one step closer to showing links between Donald Trump’s business interests in Russia and his conduct as a candidate for president...But the main takeaway is that Cohen and others in the Trump organization were actively doing a Russia deal that linked Trump’s emerging presidential candidacy with his business interest in a Moscow Trump Tower. And Trump knew about it, to a degree yet to be revealed.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. There’s just one conceivable reason for Paul Manafort’s lawyers to be meeting with President Donald Trump’s during Manafort’s plea negotiations: Manafort was looking for a pardon, and Trump’s lawyers were dangling the possibility, whether expressly or implicitly. Of all the troubling aspects of Trump’s behavior during this investigation, the hint of pardon abuse is the worst.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It’s too soon to know whether a Chinese researcher who claims to have successfully edited the genomes of newly born twins is telling the truth. But if he is, and if the girls turn out to be healthy and normal, it heralds a significant change in the scientific and ethical status of human gene editing. The outrage might not last long. The consensus in the scientific community now is that human gene editing is medically dangerous and ethically wrong. Both of those beliefs are susceptible to changing, almost as fast as science is capable of progressing.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The Democratic House of Representatives isn’t the only branch of the U.S. government headed for a clash with President Donald Trump. The Supreme Court is, too. The most recent evidence is the fight between Trump and Chief Justice John Roberts over whether it’s appropriate to categorize jurists as “Obama judges,” “Bush judges” and “Trump judges.” But the crisis has been building for two years, and the time has come for Roberts to act.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It shouldn’t be a surprise that President Donald Trump reportedly told then-White House counsel Donald McGahn that he wanted to prosecute his 2016 rival Hillary Clinton and fired FBI Director James Comey. Now that we know, however, the question is what to make of this revelation. My answer? The system is working.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The word-processing error that unintentionally revealed the Justice Department’s sealed charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is fascinating, not least because analogous mistakes can be found in texts going all the way back to the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh. It also raises important legal policy questions: In a free, open society, what justifies the use of secret indictments? Are they a nefarious tool of the deep state, like secret trials? Or are they a valuable mechanism for allowing law enforcement to do its job?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It’s on. Maryland filed a lawsuit Tuesday claiming that Matthew Whitaker can’t lawfully be acting U.S. attorney general because he has never been confirmed by the U.S. Senate. On Wednesday, the Department of Justice published its explanation for why Whitaker’s temporary appointment is lawful under the Vacancies Reform Act and the U.S. Constitution. Because the statutory and constitutional issues are technical and complex, you may well be asking yourself: What am I supposed to think? I’m here to give you an answer, albeit one that might frustrate you.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. CNN is going to win the First Amendment lawsuit it filed Tuesday against President Donald Trump’s White House for taking away reporter Jim Acosta’s press pass. And the sad truth is that Trump won’t mind at all. As the president has shown repeatedly, he doesn’t especially care if, after he violates the Constitution, the courts reverse his action. Instead of understanding judicial repudiation as a defeat, Trump sees the whole episode as a victory.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Jeff Sessions’s term as U.S. attorney general has ended — not with a bang, but with a whimper. In two years, he managed to do significant damage to the independence and standing of the Department of Justice. Yet astonishingly, despite this dubious accomplishment, Sessions also completely failed to satisfy the wishes of his principal, President Donald Trump. You wouldn’t think it was possible to pull off the double feat of alienating both the people who work for you and the person you work for, but Sessions was up to the task.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Looking for the meaning of the midterms? President Donald Trump has defined it in a tweet, threatening a criminal investigation of Democrats if the House Democratic majority uses its powers to investigate him. This statement by the president comes close to a total repudiation of the norms of democratic governance.

Jack J. Lew ’78, Secretary of the Treasury and White House Chief of Staff under former U.S. President Barack Obama, spoke Wednesday at Harvard Law School about how his Jewish background and beliefs have informed his political pursuits. Lew argued that public servants’ commitment to the nation’s interests should take precedence over their personal religious beliefs...After his lecture, Lew held a public conversation with Law School professor Noah R. Feldman ’92. The two discussed how Democrats and Republicans alike can draw on the same set of religious beliefs when defending their divergent political views.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. When the smoke from the midterm election clears, one thing is certain: You will be seeing the name of Robert Mueller a lot more than you have for the past two months, no matter whether the Democrats manage to take the U.S. House or not.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. You may find it a little eerie to discover that you are being rated by the companies you buy things from, and that the quality of customer service you receive can be determined by your “customer lifetime value” score. Maybe it reminds you too much of China’s new social credit system, which is intended to allow the government to keep tabs on citizens’ anti-social behaviors — and punish them by cutting off privileges like intercity train travel if they’re noncompliant. Better get used to it. We are no longer rated by only the credit reporting agencies, which are subject to extensive federal regulation...My Harvard Law colleague Jonathan Zittrain and my onetime teacher Jack Balkin have been arguing for some time now that tech companies should be treated by the law as fiduciaries of our data, essentially holding users’ information in trust on their behalf.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The global walkout by Google workers, a response to Alphabet Inc.’s reported protection of executives accused of sexual misconduct, may be a harbinger of something new in employer-employee relations: empowered workers’ moral-political protest directed as much against the general culture as against management. Although the walkout is connected in a broad sense to workplace conditions, this isn’t the trade union strike of old. Google’s workers are mainly professionals: engineers, not laborers. They have well-paid, high-prestige jobs at a company known for recruiting top employees. Not all of the thousands of workers who walked out were personal victims of workplace sexual harassment.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Whatever he’s being told by his lawyers, President Donald Trump can’t use an executive order to deny birthright citizenship to U.S.-born children of undocumented parents. The Constitution puts Congress, not the president, in charge of citizenship.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, rebranded late in her career as the Notorious RBG, has recently been getting all the love due to a pioneering woman Supreme Court justice. But her colleague Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who announced Tuesday that she is stepping out of public life at age 88 because of creeping dementia, is just as important in the history of the Constitution. Indeed, measured in terms of impact on the court, O’Connor had a much greater historical effect than Ginsburg, much of whose importance so far comes from her pioneering women’s rights work as a litigator.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. A South Carolina foster-care agency has asked the Trump administration to rule that it has a constitutional right to discriminate against non-Protestant and gay parents under the religious-freedom guarantee of the First Amendment. Some evangelical Christians will be upset if the agency doesn’t get an exemption from anti-discrimination rules so that it can receive federal money. But other religious groups, not to mention the American Civil Liberties Union and gay-rights organizations, will probably sue if it does. The legal issues are complicated, and it isn’t clear who would win.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. With the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a majority of U.S. Supreme Court justices have previously served as law clerks to other justices before them — an unprecedented situation on the court. The remarkable and perhaps unjustified rise of this elite-within-an-elite is worthy of discussion in its own right. But it also gives some context to last week’s revelation that the Heritage Foundation had planned a secretive boot camp for conservative law clerks about to start their jobs in the federal courts. It’s not just that the conservative think tank wanted to provide some counterweight to the comparatively liberal law school curriculum. Heritage was aiming to get a head start in its efforts to influence future judges.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: I’m not proud of it. But I am one of those people who are more viscerally upset by the allegations that journalist Jamal Khashoggi died a brutal death at the hands of Saudi secret police than by the deaths of thousands of people under Saudi bombardment in Yemen. The reason isn’t that Khashoggi was a journalist or that he was a legal U.S. resident or that he may have been dismembered, possibly while still alive. It’s much simpler and much less principled than that: It’s because I knew him.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Not for the first time, the First Amendment has saved Donald Trump. A federal district court in California was correct Monday to dismiss Stormy Daniels’s libel suit against the president for using the phrase “total con job” to describe her allegation of being threatened by an unknown man in a parking lot. Not only that, the judge was probably right to make Daniels (or her supporters on CrowdJustice) pay Trump’s legal fees. The president’s style of discourse, with its constant insistence that everyone else is a liar, is path-breaking in its coarseness. But it’s now legitimately part of public rhetoric. Denying Daniels’s claim (with ridicule thrown in) doesn’t come close to the kind of libelous speech that is exempt from First Amendment protection.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The consensus on civility emerging from Democratic Party leadership in the wake of Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation seems to be, if you can’t beat ’em join ’em. Hillary Clinton told CNN that it was impossible to be civil to Republicans until the Democrats win back Congress. And on Wednesday a tape surfaced of Eric Holder, the former attorney general who’s considering a 2020 presidential run, saying that instead of Michelle Obama’s “When they go low, we go high,” the Democratic plan should be “When they go low, we kick them.” Is going low the right choice?