Noah Feldman

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The fate of the Sept. 11 families’ lawsuit against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia may depend on the Partridge family. The Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, enacted by Congress on Thursday over President Barack Obama’s veto, is supposed to let the suit go forward. But for the federal courts to have legal authority, the families will most likely have to show that the Sept. 11 attacks were “effects” of actions taken by the Saudi government. And the leading U.S. Supreme Court case governing what counts as effects involved the actress Shirley Jones, known for her role as Shirley Partridge in the 1970s show “The Partridge Family.” Jones sued a writer and editor for the National Enquirer where she lived in California over a libelous article that was written in Florida.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. A federal appeals court this week upheld an Alabama law that bans political action committees from making donations to other political action committees. That should be good news for Democrats, who generally oppose the Citizens United decision and the flood of political spending it released. But the twist is that the law was devised to interfere with the work of the Alabama Democratic Conference, and it was the losing party in the lawsuit.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Strippers have constitutional rights too -- or at least that’s the claim of three New Orleans women challenging a Louisiana law that requires erotic dancers to be 21 to expose their breasts or buttocks. It may sound absurd, but the legal argument is pretty powerful. The law facially discriminates on the basis of sex, and arguably infringes on that classic First Amendment right to express yourself by dancing without clothes.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The U.S. Supreme Court didn’t come up Monday in the first presidential debate, and so far, it hasn’t been an important campaign issue. Given the unprecedented vacancy during an election season, that seems weird. But there is an explanation: The election’s consequences for the court are asymmetrical for the two political parties. If the Democrat, Hillary Clinton, is elected, it will change the court’s balance, either through the confirmation of President Barack Obama’s nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, in the lame-duck session or with the appointment of Garland or another liberal after she takes office. If the Republican, Donald Trump, is elected, all he can do is replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia with another conservative. That won’t change the court’s political balance.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In a case that evokes a modern-day hangman’s mask, a pharmacy that provides lethal drugs for carrying out the death penalty is arguing that it has a constitutional right to anonymity. The argument should fail, because there’s no right to confidentiality in providing government services. But it shows just how dangerously far the idea of corporate constitutional rights has gone in the era of Citizens United and Hobby Lobby.

History, as a rule, unfolds slowly at the Supreme Court. The Justices serve for decades. The cases take years. The Court’s languorous work schedule includes three months of downtime every summer. But the death of Antonin Scalia, earlier this year, jolted the institution and affirmed, once again, a venerable truism, attributed to the late Justice Byron White: “When you change one Justice, you change the whole Court.”...“There has not been a definitively liberal majority on the Supreme Court since Nixon was President,” Noah Feldman, a professor at Harvard Law School, said. “Ever since then, liberals have sometimes managed to cobble together majorities to avoid losing—on issues like affirmative action and abortion—but the energy and the initiative have been on the conservative side. That stopped, at least for now, this year.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It’s delicious to watch the Saudi outrage at being excluded from a conference in Chechnya to define who counts as a Sunni Muslim. Wahhabism, the Sunni offshoot that dominates Saudi Arabia, has done more than any other movement in Islamic history to read other Muslims out of the faith, and turnabout is fair play. Unfortunately, the conference, organized by Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, is actually part of Russian President Vladimir Putin's fiendishly clever plan to weaken Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally. The entire episode shows how ideologically vulnerable the Saudis feel in the age of Islamic State -- and how good Putin is at affecting Middle Eastern politics.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Prisoners can be counted in population totals for determining a voting district, even though they can’t cast ballots in the place where they’re being held. That's what an appeals court relying on a U.S. Supreme Court decision from last term has said -- even though that case involved noncitizens who are fully members of the community, not inmates who don’t contribute to the city or use local services. Wednesday’s decision casts some doubt on the theory of virtual representation that the justices used, and raises deep issues about the connection between voting and being represented.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Can the government block the online publication of files that let anyone make an assault rifle on a 3-D printer? In a defeat for free speech and a win for gun-control advocates, an appeals court has said yes. The court declined to suspend a State Department regulation that treats posting the files as a foreign export of munitions. Although the impulse to block the easy creation of untraceable weapons is admirable, the court got it wrong. The First Amendment can’t tolerate a prohibition on publishing unclassified information -- even if the information is potentially harmful.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Plenty of local governments open their meetings with a quick, generic prayer from a member of the clergy. But is it different when the lawmakers themselves say “Let us pray” and then supplicate God to open everyone’s heart to the message of Jesus Christ? Does that violate the Constitution? In a significant defeat for religious liberty, a federal appeals court has upheld a continuous practice of sectarian, public prayer by the members of a North Carolina board of county commissioners. The dissenting judge, the distinguished conservative J. Harvie Wilkinson, said the “seat of government” in the case was made to resemble “a house of worship.” The court’s majority said it was just following Supreme Court precedent.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The secrecy rules for grand juries contain no exceptions for cases with historical importance. In an important victory for historians, however, a divided appeals court is unsealing testimony from a 1942 leak investigation after the Battle of Midway. The decision, which was opposed by the Obama administration, sheds some light on the debate about whether the leaks by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden were justified by historic importance or were an inexcusable violation of national security.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. If Hillary Clinton wins in November, will the lame-duck Republican Senate confirm Judge Merrick Garland to the U.S. Supreme Court? Last week, Clinton said she would look for diversity and wouldn’t feel bound to renominate Garland, which in theory should give Republican senators more reason to confirm Garland, before Clinton can nominate a more liberal candidate. Yet a careful analysis of Republican senators’ incentives in the case of a Democratic win in November points the other way. If Republicans lose the presidency, the party will enter an intense period of self-reflection and disarray. And if they also lose the Senate, the disarray will be greater still. Under those conditions, it seems most likely that Republican senators wouldn’t want the final act of their majority session to be acquiescence to the judicial candidate nominated by President Barack Obama. Instead, looking to future primary challenges, they’ll have reason to reject Garland by denying him a vote -- even if that may lead to a more liberal Supreme Court in the long run.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Judges aren't history teachers. Or are they? That question lies at the heart of a deep left-right split over voting-rights laws. One side says that changes in state voting requirements should be assessed in the context of the American civil rights struggle. The other side says that history is irrelevant to the legality of modern voting practices. It's an emotional issue, exposed last week in an unusual dissent by a 94-year-old African-American federal appeals court judge in Ohio. The judge, Damon Keith, gave readers a history lesson complete with photographs and biographies of 36 men and women killed in pursuit of civil rights between 1955 and 1968.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Federal law is supposed to protect the privacy of your Social Security number from government inquiries -- but apparently that doesn’t extend to a check on whether you’ve paid back taxes and child support. In a decision with worrying implications for those who oppose a single national identification number, a divided federal appeals court has rejected a lawyer’s refusal to submit his Social Security number along with his renewal of Maryland bar membership.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. What good is the establishment clause if you can never use it? That’s the takeaway from a federal appeals court that refused to entertain a claim by parents in a New York town who allege that the Hasidic majority of the school board is illegally diverting money to religious institutions. The court relied on a narrow interpretation of the doctrine of standing, holding that the parents’ case couldn’t continue because they hadn’t been directly harmed by exposure to an unwanted religious law or message. This would be a shock to the Founding Fathers, who staunchly opposed spending tax dollars on religious causes -- but weren’t much troubled by government endorsement of religion. The appeals court’s decision stands the Framers’ establishment-clause values on their head.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Affirmative action in government contracting is alive -- barely. Last week, a federal appeals court upheld a Small Business Administration program that gives advantages to people who have suffered racial discrimination, reasoning that the law as written doesn’t discriminate on the basis of race, because anyone can be the target of racial bias. The decision, which is based on paper-thin legal logic, is an attempt to keep remediation-based affirmative action from disappearing altogether. It may be too little, too late.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. A Senate panel has called the online advertising site Backpage.com a clearinghouse for sex trafficking in minors, and has subpoenaed its policies and records. The company says it’s a canary in the coal mine for government intrusion into the editorial decisions of journalists -- and has asked the Supreme Court to block the subpoena. Chief Justice John Roberts has stayed the subpoena to read briefs from the opposing parties. When he digs into the details, he may find that both sides are at least partly right.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. We have the right to pick and choose our friends, romantic partners and guests. And there are laws to ensure that hotels or restaurants can’t discriminate on the basis of race or sex or national origin. What’s less clear is which of these standards should apply to sharing-economy services such as Airbnb, which fall somewhere in between the public and private spheres: The host is renting space, but that space is otherwise private and the host often lives there. In general, the Civil Rights Act prohibits race and sex discrimination in “public accommodations” such as hotels and lunch counters. And the Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination in long-term rentals and sales. But courts haven’t yet held that these federal laws cover an overnight stay in a private home.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. A Superior Court judge just took over Connecticut's education system, ordering state officials to undertake major reforms of funding, teacher evaluation and graduation standards. The impulse to improve education is admirable, but the judge wildly overreached his authority. The Sept. 7 decision is an object lesson in what happens when judicial restraint is ignored. Judges are poorly placed to compel and supervise detailed policy reforms, and they’re less expert on the subject than state officials who are responsible to the electorate.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The defamation lawsuit that Roger Ailes’s lawyer is threatening against New York magazine would seem to have no chance of legal success. So why has the former chairman of Fox News bothered to hire the lawyer who brought down Gawker on behalf of Hulk Hogan? The answer is that the threat puts the magazine on the defensive -- and that's a problem for free speech. The First Amendment has been interpreted to protect even defamatory speech against public figures. But as the Hogan case shows, not every court applies the constitutional standard correctly. In that environment, even legally empty threats have a chilling effect.