Noah Feldman

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Roy Moore won’t sit in the U.S. Senate -- or be expelled from it. I would like nothing more than to write his political eulogy. But I can’t -- not yet. The truth is, it’s too soon to count Moore out of Alabama politics. This is the same man who was twice removed from the chief justiceship of the state for defying the authority of the federal courts. He came back strong both times.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It’s no surprise that U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital has sparked violence in the West Bank and Beirut, or even protests in far-flung Indonesia, which is majority Muslim. But Sweden? Yet the western Swedish city of Gothenburg, headquarters of Volvo Car AB, saw the firebombing of a synagogue on Friday. The same evening, demonstrators in Malmö, in Sweden’s far south, called for their own “intifada” and threatened to shoot Jews.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. From the standpoint of producing Middle East peace, President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in a speech Wednesday can only be called irrational. It raises the risk of Palestinian violence that could derail peace efforts by his son-in-law Jared Kushner. It makes it harder for crucial U.S. allies like the Saudis to side with Trump and push the Palestinians to a deal. It won’t make Israel feel more secure. And it will hearten right-wingers in the U.S. and Israel whose endgame is actually to avoid a two-state solution.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It’s happening: President Donald Trump’s lawyer John Dowd asserted Monday that the “president cannot obstruct justice because he is the chief law enforcement officer under” Article II of the Constitution and “has every right to express his view of any case.” This radical view of what lawyers call the “unitary executive” isn’t completely crazy, especially if you take Dowd’s words charitably. But it is wrong. The president can indeed express opinions about legal cases.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The debate over the weekend about whether President Donald Trump or his lawyer wrote a tweet saying National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was fired for lying to the FBI is fascinating -- and beside the point. Despite the enthusiasm of administration critics, a tweet can’t and shouldn’t be the basis of a “confession” of a high crime for impeachment purposes. In other words, regardless of authorship, the tweet can’t be used to prove Trump obstructed justice because he knew about Flynn lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation when he urged Director James Comey to go easy on Flynn and then fired Comey.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The news that Michael Flynn pleaded guilty Friday to Russia-related offenses is striking, for several reasons. The lies he told the FBI were about asking the Russian ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, for political favors during the presidential transition, some of which the ambassador granted. The lies happened when Flynn was already national security adviser and Donald Trump was president. The fact that Flynn lied about contacts with Russia seems particularly suspicious. The content of the Flynn-Kislyak conversations deepens the narrative that special counsel Robert Mueller has been building: Earlier guilty pleas revealed Russian efforts to connect with the Trump campaign; this one reveals official contacts between the Trump team and Russia after the election -- contact significant enough for Flynn to lie to the FBI about.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Suits against President Donald Trump for abuse of executive power are an important tool for preserving the republic. But the newly filed suit by Democratic appointee Leandra English for the right to serve as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is not helping the cause.

James Madison, who wrote the first drafts of the U.S. Constitution, sponsored the Bill of Rights, and served as the fifth Secretary of State and the fourth President, was America’s least fun Founding Father...That’s the kind of book one expects upon a first glance at “The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President,” by Noah Feldman. But Feldman, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, at Harvard Law School, has written something else: a palliative for the age of Trump that never names the current President, as told through the political evolution of an important weirdo whose constant recalibrations enabled him, with increasing success, to fight epic battles with his own, founding-era “haters and losers.” Feldman is at once subtle and candid about the aptness of his narrative.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. When you get rid of your dictator, is it important to follow the rules? That delicate question is dominating the transition-in-progress in Zimbabwe, where longtime president Robert Mugabe has refused to step down despite the demands of the public, the army and his own political party. The counterintuitive answer is that it actually is worthwhile to show obedience to the rule of law, even when the person being overthrown hasn’t and doesn’t.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The claim that President Donald Trump is mentally unwell has a particular valence in today’s charged political environment. It isn’t supposed to sound like a partisan criticism. It’s supposed to sound like an objective statement of medical fact.

...To recap, we have three Americans–UCLA basketball players LiAngelo Ball, Jalen Hill and Cody Riley–arrested by Chinese authorities for alleged shoplifting. Trump took credit for their return to the states, saying he asked the country’s president Xi Jinping for help. Now we have that same president saying he should’ve done nothing. What does it mean if provable spite motivated a president’s decision to refrain from helping an American held in custody on foreign soil? Law&Crime reached out to Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman for his take on the matter, and asked if such behavior, or something like it, could be impeachable. “Not impeachable,” Feldman wrote in an email. “He was under no duty to help and no duty to be nice about it after the fact.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Fasten your seatbelts. If all the relevant actors are guided primarily by their political self-interest, Roy Moore is headed for the U.S. Senate. And if that happens, we are in for a major national fight about expelling him from his seat, which could function as a partial preview of an impeachment trial of President Donald Trump. The logic behind this analysis is that Moore will almost certainly be elected in Alabama’s special election next month. It’s effectively too late for Republicans to stage a write-in campaign against him even if they wanted to try.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. To anyone who’s been following Roy Moore for the past 15 years, there’s a single question that won’t go away: Why are we here? Given that Moore, as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court defied federal court orders and was removed from office -- not once but twice! -- it seems astonishing and outrageous that Republican voters chose him as a U.S. Senate candidate, leading to the current wave of sex-related allegations against him.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. No Donald Trump trip would be complete without a shocking quote, and this week in Beijing, at the Great Hall of the People, the president obliged. After declaring the economic playing field between China and the U.S. “one-sided” and “unfair,” he continued with a big “but”: “I don't blame China,” Trump told the audience of business leaders from both countries. “After all, who can blame a country for being able to take advantage of another country for benefit of their citizens? I give China great credit.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. As special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation proceeds, one thing is increasingly clear: If there is a serious congressional effort to impeach President Donald Trump after the midterm elections, it will have to be based not on a general sense that he’s doing a bad job, but on something much more specific, like obstruction of justice, abuse of power or subversion of the Constitution itself. For that we have the Framers to thank or blame -- and one in particular, James Madison.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. One legal question looms larger than others over special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and its possible Russia connections: What laws, exactly, would be violated by collusion if it could be shown? Remember that the word “collusion” itself has no formal legal status in this investigation. No relevant federal criminal statute that I know of makes “collusion” -- as opposed to conspiracy -- a crime. The letter appointing Mueller directs him to investigate “links and/or coordination” between Russia and the campaign, with no mention of “collusion.”

When the New York State Court of Appeals ruled in 2016 that a person who acted as a parent — despite the absence of a biological or adoptive relationship to a child — had legal standing to seek custody and visitation rights, it was hailed as progress for nontraditional families, including same-sex couples...Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor on Gunn’s legal team, says Nervo did not correctly apply the 2016 Court of Appeals ruling in deciding the case Brooke S.B. v. Elizabeth A.C.C. It also was not in keeping with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 marriage equality decision, which mandated that same-sex couples have access to all the legal benefits that straight couples do, Feldman says. “As a constitutional matter, the judge’s ruling failed to treat Kelly [Gunn] in her role the same way the law would treat a heterosexual, biological parent under those circumstances,” Feldman says.

An interview with Noah Feldman. The first charges in the Russia investigation. Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and an associate surrender to the FBI, while another campaign adviser pleads guilty -- we'll look at what it means.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. So now we know how this game of Clue starts: Paul Manafort with a wire transfer in the parlor. But Democrats who are getting revved up for special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation to follow the money from Russia to Donald Trump’s campaign shouldn’t get too excited, at least not yet. The indictment of Manafort and his associate Rick Gates means that this investigation is going deep into the weeds. Once it’s there, it could become permanently entangled with arcane bank accounts, front companies with weird names and pro-Russian Ukrainians with even more unpronounceable names.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. When we think about the framers of the Constitution and how they handled the issue of race, we conjure up the extremes: the hypocrites and the heroes. At one end is Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that “all men are created equal” but believed Africans were inferior and fathered children with an enslaved woman. At the other end is Alexander Hamilton, who, at least as depicted by admirers like the biographer Ron Chernow and the playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda, was an ardent abolitionist. This framing, however, is simplistic and misleading.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The most important constitutional amendment of 2017 isn’t to the constitution of a country: It’s the amendment approved Tuesday to the Constitution of the Chinese Communist Party, which enshrines President Xi Jinping’s “philosophy” alongside the thought of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. Talk about a sign of the times. Around the world, from Poland to Spain to Turkey, Israel, India and the U.S., constitutional democracy is undergoing a stress test. Buffeted by the forces of nationalism and populism, democratic institutions are struggling.