Noah Feldman

...As for why members of the Jewish faith have been elevated (and all by Democratic presidents), Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman said it’s partially explained by the fact that there’s a strong pipeline of Jewish judges and professors. “The reason for that is also a little hard to pin down,” Feldman said, “except to say that academia was an area which, like many other areas of American life, was originally closed to Jews in the late 19th Century.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In what may be the worst decision since the infamous Korematsu case, when the Supreme Court upheld the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the court today by a 5-4 vote upheld President Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban. Like the Korematsu decision, Trump v. Hawaii elevates legal formalities as a way to avoid addressing what everyone understood is really at issue here — namely, prejudice. Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion downplays Trump’s anti-Muslim bias, focusing instead on the president’s legal power to block immigration in the name of national security.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In a major victory for American Express Co., the U.S. Supreme Court held Monday that the company may continue to bar merchants from steering customers to credit cards that charge lower merchant fees. The 5-4 decision broke down on strictly partisan lines. It shows that the court’s conservatives don’t much care for antitrust law, and are willing to make new law in order to limit its reach. The liberal justices would prefer to stick with traditional principles that are focused on protecting consumers. On the surface, the majority opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas and the dissent by Justice Stephen Breyer are grappling over a technical question of economics: What market or markets does American Express participate in?

Lawyers for the District argued Wednesday for the dismissal of a lawsuit that challenges city regulations requiring some child-care workers to obtain associate degrees or risk losing their jobs. Two day-care workers and a parent are suing the city over the controversial rules that supporters contend will make D.C. a national model for providing high-quality care for the youngest children...A Harvard Law School professor who studies constitutional law said the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the city have just a slim chance of success. “You wouldn’t give it an F on the exam, you’d say, ‘Okay, creative argument — hard one to win, but creative argument,’ ” Noah Feldman said, referring to the suit.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday kept the much-watched partisan gerrymandering case alive – in a most unusual way. The justices sent the claim by Wisconsin Democrats that Republicans violated the Constitution in the drawing of state assembly voting districts back to the lower court. They want to see whether the plaintiffs can prove that they were individually harmed by having their votes diluted within their own districts. If they can do that, their case will almost certainly return to the Supreme Court.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In a 5-4 decision along party lines, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday upheld an Ohio law that lets the state kick people off the voter rolls if they don’t show up to vote for six years and don’t return a postcard saying they haven’t moved. It would be nice if legal principle had played any role in the decision on either side, but it didn’t, not really. The five conservatives, including Justice Anthony Kennedy, found in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute that the state law was consistent with federal law; the four liberals said it wasn’t.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. As more and more of our speech takes place on social media, courts are beginning to experiment with expanding the First Amendment, proposing that its protection of political speech applies even in privately controlled virtual spaces. The most recent example is a federal court in New York that held last month that President Trump cannot block anyone from following his Twitter account because it functions as a public forum. This is the first time, to my knowledge, that the First Amendment has ever been applied to a private platform. On the surface, this apparent expansion of free speech may seem sensible, even exciting. After all, if social media is where we do our political talking, it would seem logical to bring the Constitution to bear there.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Win by animus; lose by animus. That’s the message of the highly anticipated Masterpiece Cakeshop decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court held Monday that a baker could not be found liable for refusing to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple because the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had treated him with “hostility” based on his religious beliefs. The decision, however, is not as bad for gay rights as it could have been. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the opinion, has spent the past 25 years developing a theory of gay rights according to which the government could not treat gay people with animus, but must respect the equal dignity of all. In this opinion, he applied a version of the same theory to the Christian baker who was found to have violated Colorado’s anti-discrimination law – and found that the baker had been subject to hostility.

An interview with Noah Feldman. The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in favor of a Colorado baker who refused to bake a cake for a same sex couple's wedding. The decision has been called narrow, and does not address some of the larger free speech or religious liberty issues that were heard during oral arguments.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The best way to understand why a federal district court was wrong Wednesday, when it held that Twitter users have a constitutional right not to be blocked by President Donald Trump’s personal account, is to consider the lawsuits that will come next. I can point to a variety of reasons the decision was wrong, some of which I’ve already explored in an earlier column. It should be overturned on appeal. But chief among the problems is that the government doesn’t ultimately control what the court called the “interactive space” of replies to the president’s tweets — Twitter Inc. does.

If you wanted to measure just how different the Supreme Court is with the addition of Neil Gorsuch instead of Merrick Garland — who should be sitting in Justice Gorsuch’s seat but for the outrageous machinations of Senate Republicans — read the court’s Monday ruling in Epic Systems v. Lewis...Justice Gorsuch appears to imagine workers and employers negotiating under Marquess of Queensberry rules, engaged in a fair and equal face-off over working conditions and terms of employment. It’s a neat little story, and, “If you lived on the moon, with no knowledge of the realities of labor relations or the politics of class actions, you’d think it was obviously correct,” as Harvard law professor Noah Feldman wrote.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It’s hard to think of a contemporary writer who inspires more intense disagreement than Philip Roth, who died Tuesday at 85. From the surface, the debate seems to be about feminism: Observers have long noted that Roth’s female characters are less than fully realized, while his male characters often express misogynistic attitudes. But the disagreement, I think, goes deeper — to the question of what social function literature should fulfill. To Roth’s admirers, the point of literature is to expose depths of human experience that would otherwise be hidden or repressed. Roth certainly excelled in reporting on the vicissitude of desire, especially the male and the Jewish one. This is, after all, the man who famously described “the perfect couple: she puts the id back in Yid; I put the oy back in goy.”

President Trump's decision to block his Twitter followers for their political views is a violation of the First Amendment, a federal judge ruled Wednesday, saying that Trump's effort to silence his critics is not permissible because the digital space in which he engages with constituents is a public forum...Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor, said he thinks the case was wrongly decided and expects it to be reversed. For a public forum to exist, the government has to own or control it, he said, but in this case, Twitter also controls Trump's account.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Wondering what will happen if Justice Anthony Kennedy retires and President Donald Trump gets to pick his successor? The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday gave a good preview of that possible conservative future. In an extraordinary decision, the court barred workers from bringing collective legal action against employers if their employment contracts require individual arbitration instead. Seen purely in terms of politics, the 5-4 outcome reflected the struggle between the pro-management conservative majority and the pro-labor liberal minority. Employers don’t want class actions filed against them. By making employees sign agreements that require individual arbitration of disputes, businesses can now be sure that they won’t be taken to court when they’ve shortchanged many employees minimally — even if the collective loss to employees is significant. From the perspective of employers, the decision is a major win.

Bloomberg Opinion Weekend Edition hosted by June Grasso. Guests:...Noah Feldman, Harvard Law School professor and Bloomberg Opinion columnist: "Sports Betting Is a Victory for States’ Rights."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In politics, disagreement is good. But our current moment of polarization looks more like a political disaster: People of different beliefs watch different cable news channels, read different news sites, and listen to different radio stations. Is there an antidote? And if so, what would it look like? Here at Bloomberg Opinion, we have an idea for an experiment on a modest scale to begin the process of addressing the challenge. It’s an experiment in video, and it relies on a technique for arguments that we’re calling “The Method,” with apologies to Socrates.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman...Color me genuinely confused by the outcry against Texas televangelist Robert Jeffress, who spoke Monday at the opening of the American Embassy in Jerusalem. Jeffress has previously said that “you can’t be saved being a Jew,” that Mormonism is a “heresy” and that Islam is “wrong.” It seems strange to me, for example, that Mitt Romney, a devout Mormon, is tweeting that Jeffress is “a religious bigot.” Do those statements really make Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, a bigot? All he is doing is echoing an almost 1,800-year-old doctrine: Extra ecclesiam nulla salus, there is no salvation outside the church. It can be traced to St. Cyprian of Carthage, who died in the year 258. The basic idea is that Jesus Christ came to save those who believe in him — and not those who don’t.

Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman offers two ways to predict whether the North Korean leader will ultimately commit to a peace process. The first in The Method, a new video series.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In an important states’-rights decision announced Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court has allowed New Jersey to permit sports gambling, both by private casinos and through state-run lotteries. The case, Murphy v. NCAA, has important constitutional consequences – and could have a major economic impact as well. The law at issue is the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which Congress enacted in 1992. It prohibited states from either operating sports gambling or authorizing private actors like casinos to run sports gambling. Importantly, the law didn’t make sports gambling a federal crime. Instead, to save money on federal law enforcement, it relied on states’ existing prohibitions plus the ban on authorization.