Noah Feldman

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.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Don’t be fooled by the superficially amicable split between the Boy Scouts of America and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The breakup, in fact, reflects a long festering period of incompatibility and will have consequences for both institutions and for the possibility of respectful disagreements in our federal republic. The immediate impetus for the divorce might seem to be the decision by the Boy Scouts to rename itself “Scouts BSA” in recognition of the fact that girls may now participate in its activities.

Noah Feldman, Harvard Law Professor and Bloomberg Opinion columnist, on the payments that Michael Cohen received from corporations and a Russian oligarch, and the line between lobbying and bribes.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. “Follow the money.” That Watergate meme is now poised to dominate the Donald Trump-Michael Cohen investigation for this news cycle — and beyond. The impetus is a document released by lawyer Michael Avenatti, confirmed by the New York Times, that revealed that a shell company Cohen created and used to pay off the porn star Stormy Daniels received $500,000 from a company linked to a Russian oligarch with ties to Vladimir Putin.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. As more details emerge about President Donald Trump’s self-described fixer Michael Cohen, the whole mess in which Trump now finds himself may seem inevitable: Lie down with dogs and you wake up with fleas, as Poor Richard’s Almanac memorably put it. But that’s wrong. Trump could have avoided a full-on criminal investigation of the lawyer who paid off Stormy Daniels and did who knows what else that seems likely to create further serious legal problems for the president. We are where we are because of something very concrete Trump did himself a year ago this week: On May 9, 2017, the president fired James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Now that we are finished with the spectacle of the U.S. House chaplain being forced out, then withdrawing his resignation and returning to his post, it’s a good time to ask a question that may have been bothering you all along: Why, exactly, does Congress, bound by the establishment clause of the Constitution, have a paid chaplain to deliver prayers and minister to its members?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. There’s something extremely fishy about President Donald Trump’s tweets on Thursday morning about the source of the money his lawyer Michael Cohen paid to Stormy Daniels as part of a nondisclosure agreement. Trump, echoing what his lawyer Rudy Giuliani said Wednesday night on Fox News, seems to be claiming that a $35,000 retainer he paid to Cohen on a monthly basis should be considered reimbursement. But a retainer isn’t reimbursement. A retainer is a fee for services. And a fee paid to a lawyer isn’t normally reimbursement unless there is some agreement saying it is.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Libel law is evolving before our eyes. Stephanie Clifford, aka Stormy Daniels, has sued Donald Trump for libel on the ground that the president tweeted that her allegations that she was threatened over their sexual liaison are “a total con job.” The legal theory of the suit, filed Monday in New York, is in line with Summer Zervos’s libel suit against Trump for repeatedly denying her allegations that he kissed and touched her inappropriately. Both lawsuits are creative attempts to push libel law in a direction that fits the #MeToo moment.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. One thing became clear during Wednesday’s oral argument at the U.S. Supreme Court about President Donald Trump’s travel ban: Justice Elena Kagan has a strategy to persuade swing Justice Anthony Kennedy to vote against the ban. Her approach will be to depict the case as a watershed moment in the court’s jurisprudence about bias — thus making it extraordinarily difficult for Kennedy to find himself on the wrong side of history.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Conservative law professor Kevin Walsh, in an intriguing new article, makes the case for repealing the “natural born” citizenship requirement for the presidency. Next month it will be 150 years since such a proposal for a constitutional amendment was first put before Congress. Today it really makes no sense to discriminate against naturalized citizens when it comes to the presidency, assuming it ever did in the first place. I can think of three further reasons that the timing is right. For one, between election cycles, it isn’t about possible candidates who were born abroad: Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jennifer Granholm or Ted Cruz (who probably isn’t barred anyway). It’s about the principle on its own.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. James Comey’s extraordinary attacks on Donald Trump as “morally unfit” to be president are more than a ploy to sell books. The unprecedented phenomenon of a fired FBI director taking on a sitting president is also a symptom of the most fundamental challenge facing the U.S. political system today. Put simply: There’s no single, nonpartisan trusted source of authority. In the recent past, nonpartisan law enforcement would have been trusted by broad swaths of the American people. Centrist news media would have been accepted by most members of both parties as authoritative.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Make no mistake: The presidency of Donald Trump has hit a major inflection point with the investigation of his personal lawyer Michael Cohen by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. Until now, Trump personally was in jeopardy only if special counsel Robert Mueller’s team in Washington finds evidence that he knew about collusion between his campaign and Russia in the 2016 election...Now, however, the Southern District can investigate potential Trump crimes in any area connected to Cohen, a fixer who is known to have arranged payoffs to an adult film star who says she had an affair with Trump. These prosecutors can go back as far as they want before the election, not to mention during and after it.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. What if Donald Trump tries to fire Robert Mueller -- and fails? The scenario isn’t far-fetched. Under Department of Justice regulations, the special counsel, Mueller, can only be fired “by the personal action of the Attorney General” for “misconduct, dereliction of duty, incapacity, conflict of interest, or for other good cause.” President Trump, who doesn’t much care for legal technicalities, has ramped up his attacks on the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and on Mueller himself. We know from the New York Times that he has at least twice tried to shut down the probe. Trump might yet try to fire Mueller directly; his press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Tuesday that the president “certainly believes he has the power” to do so.

The idea that Donald Trump might fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller and in so doing spark some kind of constitutional crisis has been gaining traction for months now. Political junkies, especially on the liberal side of the spectrum, have breathlessly discussed the scenario in neighborhood bars and on approximately 1,000 different podcasts...For some context on just how bad things are at this moment compared to October 1973—when an embattled Richard Nixon went on his own firing spree in hopes of scuttling the Watergate probe—I called up my favorite legal scholar, Noah Feldman. The historian and Harvard Law professor is usually pretty measured in assessing Trump's presidency, but he said some things that genuinely frightened me.