Noah Feldman

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: A federal appeals court has dismissed all complaints brought against Justice Brett Kavanaugh as a result of his confirmation hearings—because he’s now on the U.S. Supreme Court. Legally, the decision is probably correct. The federal Judicial Conduct Act, passed by Congress, doesn’t apply to the Supreme Court justices. And the Code of Conduct for U.S. Judges, adopted by the federal courts’ policy-making body, doesn’t apply to the justices either.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The decision on Friday by a federal court judge in Texas to block the Affordable Care Act nationwide is a poetically perfect year-end twist in the Obamacare saga. Not since the first New Deal has a generational social change been so mired in judicial interference. Democrats on the streets may think they are pursuing the resistance against President Donald Trump. But the most effective resistance in the U.S. today is judicial resistance — in this case, by a conservative George W. Bush appointee to the signature initiative of Barack Obama’s administration.

Noah Feldman, Harvard Law Professor and Bloomberg Opinion columnist, discussed his column: "Trump’s Tweeting His Post-Presidency Defense Now."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: President Donald Trump’s three-tweet sequence on Michael CohenThursday morning was different from the usual presidential stream of consciousness. Compact and carefully reasoned, the tweets sound an awful lot like they were written with a lawyer standing at the writer’s shoulder. Taken together, the tweets signal that Trump and his team are genuinely concerned about the possibility of his being indicted after leaving office — totally separate from any danger of impeachment. That’s significant.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: With Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s onetime lawyer and “fixer,” sentenced Wednesday to three years in prison, it’s worth asking: What will be the verdict of history on his crimes? Specifically, the felony campaign-finance violations connected to the payoffs to two women who said they had sexual affairs with the future president? Cohen said the payoffs were directed by then-candidate Trump — and the prosecutors of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York agreed. The answer depends on which of two competing paradigms for presidential wrongdoing the Cohen payoffs ultimately fall into.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Justice Clarence Thomas has a message for Justice Brett Kavanaugh: Let’s roll. Kavanaugh, however, isn’t yet taking up the invitation. The newest member of the U.S. Supreme Court may eventually join a conservative majority of five to roll back large swaths of liberal jurisprudence. Yet it’s noteworthy that Thomas is already impatient with Kavanaugh, just a couple of months into the latter’s life tenure. All this is the takeaway from the tea leaves of an otherwise opaque opinion issued Monday with Thomas dissenting from the court’s refusal to hear a case brought by Planned Parenthood.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Repatriating looted art has become an everyday reality. In the last few months alone, U.S. museums returned two statues stolen from India, and Thailand made an official request for the return of 23 works in American collections. Although reasonable people can disagree about the right home for artifacts like the Elgin marbles, which Greece wants back from the British Museum, or the Koh-i-noor diamond, which India believes should be returned from the collection of crown jewels kept in the Tower of London, it’s safe to say that there is often a credible ethical claim to be made in favor of returning works to the nations from which they were once taken.

The pair of lawsuits challenging Harvard’s sanctions rely on unusual and in some cases far-fetched legal arguments — but it is too early to know whether the complaints will be successful, experts say...Harvard Law School professor Noah R. Feldman ’92 said lawyers will have to get “creative” going forward if they hope to argue Massachusetts state law protects students’ right to join social groups. The attorneys are specifically alleging the penalties violate undergraduates’ freedom of association as guaranteed under the Massachusetts Civil Rights Act. Feldman said the freedom of association argument may prove viable. But he also noted Harvard may have its own claim to freedom of association under Massachusetts law: the University could argue that it has the freedom to associate — and not associate — with whomever it chooses, he said. Under this interpretation of the law, Harvard would have broad discretion to sanction social groups.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. When I heard that Israeli police had recommended the indictment of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on corruption charges for the third time, I knew my job: sit down and write a column about how Israel faces a definitional moment in its struggle to maintain democracy and the rule of law. I’m still going to write that column...But before I go into the details of the scandal and what the Israeli attorney general’s office ought to do with the police recommendation, I have to pause for an admission. As an American, I hold no moral high ground from which to criticize Israel’s engagement with executive corruption.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In the run-up to Saturday’s crucial meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Group of 20 meeting in Argentina, the U.S. is signaling that cyberespionage will be a crucial part of its grievances against China. The basic complaint is that while both China and the U.S. try to hack each other’s national security apparatus, China also attacks private U.S. companies for the benefit of its own enterprises. The American allegation of asymmetry is accurate — but it’s also starting to seem outdated and more than a little hypocritical.

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.