Noah Feldman

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Today, the Supreme Court is hearing two cases that are widely expected to overturn long-standing precedent and reject diversity as…

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Conservatives have never liked the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the brainchild of Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. Now a conservative panel…

Deep Background with Noah Feldman: Here’s a preview of a new podcast from Pushkin Industries, Story of the Week with journalist Joel Stein. On Story…

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: At the end of this month, the US Supreme Court is poised to hear arguments in two closely watched cases…

On the eve of the new term of America’s Supreme Court, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, host of the global public affairs program Fareed Zakaria GPS, dives…

Perhaps you have wandered through much of your life only mildly aware and mostly indifferent to the fact that there is something called Constitution Day.

Deep Background with Noah Feldman – Sharing a preview of the new season of Revisionist History, Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast about things misunderstood and overlooked. This…

Bloomberg – An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The long march of religious liberty exemptions is gaining speed. The people who brought you contraceptive care exemptions…

Bloomberg – An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Start circling the wagons. That’s the message a federal district judge is sending to other Trump-appointed judges by…

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Liberals are understandably delighted that Congress has managed to repudiate the outcome of at least one major case the Supreme…

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The leaked draft of a majority Supreme Court decision by Justice Samuel Alito overturning Roe v. Wade means several things. First, it indicates that in the justices’ private conference, at least five members of the court voted to reverse the 1973 abortion precedent. They aren’t bound by that vote, which they can change up to the day the final opinion is released. Almost all first drafts undergo significant revision based on discussion and debate among the justices. So the second point to make is that Roe isn’t yet overturned, though it very likely will be.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: I feel bad for anyone not steeped in establishment clause jurisprudence who happened to listen to the Supreme Court’s oral arguments in the football coach prayer case, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. On the surface, the question is simple: Can the public high school coach kneel and pray silently on the 50-yard line after games? But the doctrine the court has created over the years is so complicated and confused that you would be hard-pressed to make any sense of the debates without a law school course on the First Amendment under your belt.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: I feel bad for anyone not steeped in establishment clause jurisprudence who happened to listen to the Supreme Court’s oral arguments in the football coach prayer case, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. On the surface, the question is simple: Can the public high school coach kneel and pray silently on the 50-yard line after games? But the doctrine the court has created over the years is so complicated and confused that you would be hard-pressed to make any sense of the debates without a law school course on the First Amendment under your belt.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Among the weird things in Elon Musk’s recent TED interview was how blatantly he appeared to violate the terms of a settlement agreement he reached with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2018. At issue was his claim that he had the financing to take Tesla private. “Funding was actually secured,” he assured TED chief Chris Anderson.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Even before the Supreme Court reverses Roe v. Wade, as most court watchers expect it to do this June, the legal battle about the aftermath of the decision is getting underway. By far the most consequential aspect of the fight is likely to be about state attempts to regulate medical abortions using the drug mifepristone. For pro-choice advocates, mifepristone represents the only cost-effective workaround for women who want to end unwanted pregnancies but who live in the 25 or more states that will ban abortion after Roe is overturned. Some people have the means to travel out of state for surgical abortions. And, with enough financial support, some national organizations might be able to help pay the way for those who cannot afford the trip and the surgery.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: We live in a world where the Supreme Court is poised to give conservatives huge wins on abortion, guns and affirmative action. The popular passions over those issues make it hard to interest the general public in the conservative majority’s far more subtle and gradual efforts to change the way the court does its business by essentially deciding cases that are still before the lower courts. Yet that change matters. It tells you a lot about how the conservative majority is thinking about the next few years and its strategy to change the direction of the law beyond the big-ticket cases that make headlines.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: If colleges still thought there was little risk in taking up their students’ causes, they should reconsider in light of what has happened to Oberlin College. An Ohio appeals court has upheld $30 million-plus in damages in a lawsuit against the school brought by a local bakery that was accused of a history of racial profiling. The case has gotten lots of attention as a touchstone in the culture wars and because of the free expression issues surrounding it. Although the case could still be appealed to the Ohio Supreme Court — and even conceivably to the U.S. Supreme Court — it is now possible to derive some hardheaded lessons from the process thus far. For one thing, universities need to be extremely careful about how they interact with student protests if they want to avoid being held liable for their students’ words and actions.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Three conservative Supreme Court justices declared this month that the Constitution should be read to give state legislatures unlimited control of electoral procedures, and a fourth said the issue is important enough for the whole court to consider. That’s scary because it could eventually block even state courts from stopping partisan cheating. What’s most important about the issue, however, isn’t the remote (for now) danger that a majority of the court might make a disastrous decision that undermines democracy. It’s the new kind of reasoning that the conservatives are using to reach their preferred result.