Noah Feldman

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: It’s easy to bemoan the Gawker-Hulk Hogan settlement and condemn the Florida courts for not throwing out the verdict. But there’s a deeper point that matters more and shouldn’t be lost: The First Amendment and its values can be thwarted and distorted by private actors with extremely deep pockets.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Striking a blow against popular sovereignty by referendum, the U.K. High Court of Justice held Thursday that Britain can’t leave the European Union without an act of Parliament. Because British constitutional thought is so different from its U.S. and European equivalents, the decision will be difficult for the U.K.’s Supreme Court to overturn. It’s now much more likely than not that the courts will save Britain from its ill-conceived Brexit vote. The people may have spoken -- but the court said that wasn’t good enough.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Is the middle-finger gesture obscene? Not in Pennsylvania, according to a state appellate decision filed this week reversing a man’s conviction for giving his ex-wife the finger. Decided in the shadow of the First Amendment, the decision raises the ever-intriguing question of what counts as obscenity. It also calls into question the old idea that obscene speech is exempt from the constitutional rules governing freedom of speech.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Pope Francis is continuing along his remarkably liberal path, most recently by praising Martin Luther at a ceremony in Sweden beginning a yearlong 500th anniversary commemoration of the Reformation. Yet despite the pope’s openness, and the corresponding good faith of the Lutherans, the two sides were unable to effect a reconciliation. The episode raises two questions: Why try? And how is it that, in this post-theological age, not even Christian believers can get past their own wars of religion?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Friday to hear the case of a transgender teen who seeks to use the boys’ room at his high school during his senior year. Given that the appeals court had ruled in his favor, it’s unfortunate that the court took up the case. It’s too soon, in cultural terms, for the court to rule definitively on the subtle issue of transgender rights, which poses powerful equality claims against society’s deeply ingrained male-female gender binaries. Transgender rights could benefit from a longer lead time for the lower courts to explore the different aspects of the question -- and for the American people to develop a consensus.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Federal prosecutors in Colorado have found a way to use a serious tool against fraud to persecute some fringe political dissenters. The protesters, who deny the legitimacy of the U.S. government, take bills they owe, add notes to the effect of “Thank you for paying this debt,” and send them to government agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The government doesn’t pay the debts -- it throws the notices in the trash. Yet prosecutors are outrageously charging the protesters under the False Claims Act with the felony of submitting fraudulent financial claims on the government. This serious abuse of power violates the First Amendment -- and verges on prosecutorial misconduct.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Under securities law, a publicly disclosed half-truth is worse than no truth at all, according to an appeals court opinion filed this week involving Arena Pharmaceuticals Inc. The decision has an intuitive moral appeal. But it’s not at all clear that it makes sense from the standpoint of investors, who might be misled just as thoroughly by failure to disclose material information as they would be by partial disclosure.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. As a lawyer, I’m embarrassed that the American Bar Association commissioned a report about Donald Trump’s use of libel threats, then refused to publish it out of fear that Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, would sue the organization for libel. The episode, however, dramatizes how effective libel threats are in chilling speech -- and how they work in real life, driven by the professional caution that lawyers cultivate on behalf of their clients.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Two important Guantanamo military commission cases are hovering on the edge of review by the U.S. Supreme Court, and the bad news is, both involve claims of legal overreach by government prosecutors. One defendant says he can’t be tried for the USS Cole bombing in 2000, because the U.S. wasn’t at war with al-Qaeda until Sept. 11, 2001. The other says he can’t be convicted of a conspiracy that didn’t come to fruition because international law doesn’t recognize such a crime. So far, neither defendant has prevailed in the lower courts, and it’s hard to say exactly how the Supreme Court would rule if it takes either of the cases. But what’s noteworthy is that, no matter the outcome, these two Guantanamo trials are going to end up tainted in the eyes of future legal scholars and analysts.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The new South Africa has been a bastion of respect for human rights, and its decision to withdraw from the International Criminal Court is a sign that something is terribly wrong with the tribunal. And it’s no secret: Since 2005, when it first issued arrest warrants, the court has indicted 39 people, every one of them African. There are various explanations for this, some of them defensible. But the bottom line is that it was an inexcusable mistake for the court not to pursue other cases. It wouldn’t have been tokenism, because there are, unfortunately, plenty of non-African war criminals. Yet even if it were, the tokenism would have been justified to show that the court is more than the imperialist agent of regime change that many Africans consider it.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. With Donald Trump’s chances of winning the White House narrowing, it’s not too soon to ask: If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency in November, what attitude should Democrats and Republicans alike take toward Trump voters? It will be tempting to excoriate or patronize them, or to woo them to your cause. But all of these approaches would be mistaken. A much better strategy -- for both parties -- is to engage in selective memory, and to treat Trump voters as though the whole sorry episode of his candidacy never occurred. That may seem counterintuitive, especially because there’s no doubt that Trump’s candidacy shows the system needs fixing. But it’s based on the solid intuition that Trump voters, many of them alienated already from mainstream party politics, will only be further alienated by anything that associates them with a candidate whose brand was victory and who delivered defeat.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. If Donald Trump loses the election and doesn’t concede, it won’t violate the U.S. Constitution. But it would break a tradition of concession that dates back more than a century and has achieved quasi-constitutional status. And like most enduring political customs, its value goes beyond graciousness: It helps ensure the continuity of government and offers a legitimating assist to democracy itself.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Senator John McCain may not have meant to say that a Republican Senate would refuse to vote, either up or down, on any Supreme Court nominee put up by Hillary Clinton. But what if Republican senators just said they would vote down any candidate Clinton nominated? Would the resulting political standoff amount to a constitutional crisis?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Compared with the rest of the third presidential debate Wednesday night, the opening conversation about the Constitution was practically Lincoln-Douglas-like as the candidates answered questions and didn't interrupt each other. But the discussion of the seminal gun control case D.C. v. Heller was borderline incomprehensible unless you've recently taken constitutional law. And in giving an answer intended to express moderation on gun rights, Hillary Clinton missed a chance to express support for the original meaning of the Constitution.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. An extraordinary poll released Wednesday showed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump both losing in Utah to Evan McMullin, a conservative Mormon ex-CIA officer only on the ballot in 11 states. The best explanation for the rise of this independent candidate is that Mormons, who tend to have deeply conservative values, are genuinely repulsed by Donald Trump. And not just by the crude comments and allegations of sexual assault that recently came to light, but also by Trump’s anti-Muslim sentiment, which the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints implicitly condemned 10 months ago.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Is Brexit unconstitutional? That’s the key issue in a suit argued this week before the High Court in London. What makes the question especially piquant is that Britain doesn’t have a single written constitution, but rather a complex tradition of constitutional law made up of principles, precedents and practices accrued over generations. Under those principles, the answer to whether the U.K. can leave the European Union without a parliamentary vote is … maybe. It seems most likely that the High Court -- or the Supreme Court, which will hear an appeal next -- will say that Brexit can be accomplished without it. But to reach that conclusion, the British courts will have to expand existing principles, and grapple with the meaning of the referendum as a political tool. It’s a sad day for the country that arguably invented representative government.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The Israeli press and government are in an uproar about a resolution submitted to UNESCO, the United Nations’s cultural agency, by seven Arab states that, they say, denies the connection between the Jewish people and the Temple Mount. The resolution, ratified Tuesday, is hopelessly one-sided, which is not a shock for a UN entity that operates on a majority vote and without a Security Council veto. But what’s fascinating is that the Israelis are treating the resolution as an assault on their religious-historical claims to the site, which the report addresses only obliquely. This is a deepening problem on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the slow transformation from a national struggle into a religious one. And the religious struggle never seems more intractable than when the topic is the Temple Mount.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. By law, the federal government is supposed to manage the wild horse population in the West. But what happens if, despite an overabundance of the beautiful beasts, the government does nothing about it? The official answer is not much, according to a federal appeals court that turned down Wyoming’s challenge to federal inaction. The decision follows familiar principles of deference to agency action (or, in this case, inaction). But it leaves farmers or others negatively affected by the overpopulation with essentially no recourse, a result that seems at odds with the intent of the law.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. There’s no need to believe the Russian propaganda that says the U.S. agreed to let 9,000 Islamic State fighters flee Mosul to go fight President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. But the story “reported” Wednesday by Russia Today (on the basis of a single anonymous source) does capture a strategic truth in the run-up to the attack on the Islamic State-controlled city: The fighters have good reason to flee -- and the Iraqis and the U.S. have good reason to let them.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Is it unlawful race discrimination for a company to ban dreadlocks in the workplace? In a decision that has become a topic of debate among law professors, a federal appeals court said no last month. The case is so important because the court defined race as biology, emphasizing “immutable characteristics” as the subject of anti-discrimination law. But for more than 75 years, scholars have understood that race is as much or more a matter of culture than it is about biological reality. The decision in EEOC v. Catastrophic Management Solutions is therefore built on quicksand -- and it’s a mistake to embrace it, even if on some level the result might seem like common sense.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. A Saudi airstrike that destroyed a funeral hall and killed 140 people Saturday in Yemen is a scenario U.S. lawyers have been worried about under international law. Documents obtained by Reuters reveal that State Department lawyers were concerned that arms sales to the Saudis might make the U.S. liable for war crimes the Saudis might commit. The U.S. hasn’t been giving targets to the Saudis but, problematically, it has provided a no-strike list including critical infrastructure. In effect, that may make the U.S. complicit in targeting decisions like the one that tragically hit the funeral hall. Worse, the U.S. has been refueling Saudi warplanes for strikes in Yemen.