Noah Feldman

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In a powerful opinion that will become part of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s ever-growing liberal legacy, the U.S. Supreme Court held in a split opinion Monday that a jury’s verdict may be reopened if there is evidence of racial bias by the jurors. The decision confronted a legal contradiction between the interest in treating jury verdicts as a black box not to be opened and the imperative of racial justice -- and opted for the latter. The decision is unusually honest and direct about how race in America has historically tainted the fairness of the judicial system.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The sitting president has accused his predecessor of an act that could have gotten the past president impeached. That’s not your ordinary exercise of free speech. If the accusation were true, and President Barack Obama ordered a warrantless wiretap of Donald Trump during the campaign, the scandal would be of Watergate-level proportions.But if the allegation is not true and is unsupported by evidence, that too should be a scandal on a major scale. This is the kind of accusation that, taken as part of a broader course of conduct, could get the current president impeached. We shouldn’t care that the allegation was made early on a Saturday morning on Twitter.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The ongoing saga of contacts between Russian officials and the Donald Trump campaign assures that the subject of government leaks isn’t going away anytime soon. Although some critics have compared the career bureaucrats suspected of doing the leaking to the “deep state” that has bedeviled reformers in Egypt and Turkey, the First Amendment hasn’t been brought into the conversation. It should be. As it turns out, there are competing constitutional views about bureaucrats’ engagement with public affairs.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In response to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, North Dakota has enacted four new laws clearly aimed at protesters. One of them stands out: The law makes it a misdemeanor to wear a mask or hood while committing a crime. That sounds reasonable -- anonymity can facilitate crime, and it makes sense to punish a masked bank robber more harshly than an unmasked one. Yet the law is more troubling in the context of the punishment of protesters, who sometimes cover their faces to make a political point. The mask law therefore raises a constitutional question: How should we think about laws that seem to be targeted at conduct but may actually be aimed at speech?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In an important decision that’s unusual for being almost unanimous, the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday clarified the constitutional rule for the design of majority-minority legislative districts, perhaps the single most significant issue in contemporary voting-rights law. The districting in this case took place under the old rules, before the court struck down a section of the Voting Rights Act. But the decision points the way to the constitutional doctrine of the future: voting-rights law that’s more consensual than has been the historic norm.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Monday’s U.S. Supreme Court argument about whether sex offenders can be barred from social media had the justices observing that even the president uses Twitter. But the ubiquity of social media in politics is only the most superficial aspect of how new forms of publishing are challenging the First Amendment. In areas such as campaign finance and libel law, it’s a different legal ballgame than it was just a few years ago -- and the changes can be expected to multiply with time.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. President Donald Trump’s war on the news media violates the spirit of the free press. How far can he go before he violates the letter of the First Amendment? Case in point: the exclusion of CNN, the New York Times, Politico and other media outlets from a White House press briefing Friday. It violates the basic constitutional ideal that the government can’t discriminate among various speakers on the basis of their viewpoints. Under existing case law, however, the exclusion probably doesn’t violate the Constitution, because the news outlets remain free to speak despite losing a degree of access.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Under existing doctrine, a federal district judge was probably right to temporarily block a California law designed to stop certain websites from listing actors' ages. But why shouldn't your age be a private fact you can keep to yourself? Not only can your age be used against you discriminatorily, but you also have a First Amendment right to lie about your age provided you aren’t engaging in fraud. This is an instance of a genuine, deep conflict between privacy and free speech. And in this instance, our system may have set the balance too far toward speech.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Now that the Trump administration has reversed the Department of Education policy on transgender bathroom use, the Supreme Court will probably dismiss the case it’s hearing on the matter rather than issue a decision. But even if that happens -- and it isn’t 100 percent certain -- the result may be better for transgender-rights advocates than judgment on the merits would have been. In the long run, the movement would be better off with a decision that reads federal anti-discrimination law as protecting against transgender bias than with a decision that makes protection depend upon the whims of the administration charged with implementing the law.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The Supreme Court made it easier on Wednesday for U.S. manufacturers to infringe patents held by competitors by manufacturing all but one of the infringing components abroad. The practical consequences could be significant, as could the court’s apparent view that the key U.S. appeals court for patent cases has been too sympathetic to patent holders.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. President Donald Trump is poised to announce a redrafted executive order on immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries. Will it pass legal muster? Or will the courts once again thwart the president’s will? Early reports suggest that the new order will be drafted to avoid many of the legal problems that were posed by the earlier version, and to make judicial review harder to obtain. But the crucial question is whether the courts will consider the political context in which the order was drafted to conclude that it is still a Muslim ban under another name. Whether the court should do so turns out to be a close legal question.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. President Donald Trump has threatened to prosecute leakers and bring in an outsider to review the intelligence agencies after reading unfavorable stories about his administration day after day in the news media. But he’s learning the hard way that there isn’t much he can do to stop government leaks. That may surprise Trump, because in the private sector, the tools to stop leaking are generally pretty effective. It’s an anomaly of the legal system that in government, where the stakes are arguably higher than in business, it’s easier to get away with leaking.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration that targeted Muslim countries, now halted by federal judicial order, was worrying enough. But another executive action has been floated that would be far more devastating for Muslim individuals and organizations in the U.S.: a directive to the State Department to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as an international terrorist organization. When coupled with a U.S. Supreme Court decision from 2010, the designation could lead to widespread prosecution of American Muslims and others for material support of terrorism -- a disaster for civil liberties and free speech that could dwarf the Trump administration’s early initiatives.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. For the last several years it has been increasingly common to hear Israelis and Palestinians alike say that the two-state solution to their struggles is dead and that the time has come to discuss a one-state solution. U.S. President Donald Trump acknowledged that trend during a news conference Wednesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by saying that he is “looking at two states and at one state” while remaining open to whichever suits the parties. There’s just one problem: “One-state solution” means something almost completely different on each of the two sides. Years of negotiation and debate have created the general contours of a two-state solution, but when people speak of one-state options, they lack that common ground.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. If the U.S. Supreme Court were to reverse Roe v. Wade, individual states could still permit abortion. But, in theory, the Supreme Court could go further, and rule that laws permitting abortion violate the equal protection rights of unborn fetuses. That may seem far-fetched -- but in his book on assisted suicide and euthanasia, Judge Neil Gorsuch lays out an argument that could easily be used to this end. Gorsuch, President Donald Trump’s nominee for a seat on the Supreme Court, carefully avoids discussing abortion rights directly in his book. Yet his disparagement of what he calls “ageism” amounts to a principle that could easily be applied to fetuses.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The resignation of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn grew out of Department of Justice concerns that he had violated the Logan Act, a law from 1799(!) that bars private citizens from engaging in international diplomacy. The law as written applied to Flynn even though he was working for the president-elect when he engaged in a phone call with Russian ambassador to the U.S. But there’s a more serious problem, which should be kept in mind in case there’s an investigation of whether Donald Trump violated the law: It is probably unconstitutional. Enacted by the Congress that brought you the Alien and Sedition acts, the law is too vague for enforcement. And it violates free-speech standards that are the law today but went unrecognized by the John Adams administration.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Wednesday’s White House visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has raised speculation that U.S. President Donald Trump will try to tackle Middle East peace, perhaps relying on the efforts of his counselor and son-in-law Jared Kushner. Putting aside the national security turbulence in the administration right now, can it really be done? It’s a given that the odds are long against a comprehensive deal involving the Israelis and the Palestinians. But if everything went just right, and the Trump administration was prepared to make both sides offers they couldn’t refuse, it’s just barely possible that it could generate -- or really, impose -- a regional agreement that would be an improvement over the status quo and might last for some time. To do so, however, the Trump administration would have to offer inducements much greater than have been offered in the past and make credible threats that have been considered unthinkable by previous American leaders.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. U.S. President Donald Trump’s phone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping and the weekend visit of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe are important reminders of a basic reality: While we Americans obsess over the constitutionality of the president’s executive order on immigration, the rest of the world keeps on going. Measured by number of people it affects, foreign policy outranks domestic affairs. If Trump manages to create diplomatic chaos in Asia, history won’t pay much attention to the rest of his presidency.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit upholding a nationwide freeze on Donald Trump’s immigration executive order is a powerful rebuff to the administration -- and to the president personally. The court went out of its way in its opinion released Thursday to emphasize the right and the duty of the judiciary to rule on the constitutionality of executive action, even when national security is on the line. The unanimous panel was unwilling to bow to the personal pressure that Trump aimed at it. And, tellingly, the most important recent precedents the court cited were written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose vote will be crucial if and when the case goes to the U.S. Supreme Court.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. White House counselor Kellyanne Conway broke federal ethics rules Thursday by endorsing Ivanka Trump’s clothing line -- that much is open and shut. If Conway worked for a regular government agency, she’d be temporarily suspended for a first offense, and fired for a second. But because her punishment depends on President Donald Trump, she has been “counseled,” not sanctioned. There’s a lesson here about difference between law and morals. It may seem worrisome that ethics rules can be so easily ignored by an administration that chooses to do so. But the truth is that, ultimately, ethics rules are only as good as the administration that applies them. If we don’t like the administration’s morality, we have only one real option: vote it out of office.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. No matter how the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit rules, the legal challenges to President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration from seven majority Muslim countries won’t be over. Not even close. That’s because, in addition to the case that currently has the policy on hold, a number of challenges to different aspects of the order by different kinds of plaintiffs are pending in courts across the country. This may seem perverse, given the need for a single immigration policy. But it’s the way challenges to federal action proceed almost all of the time, and it follows the same convoluted path as the arguments against the Affordable Care Act during Barack Obama’s presidency. Ultimately only the U.S. Supreme Court can impose uniformity throughout the federal judicial system. This system isn’t perfect, but it has stood the test of time.