Noah Feldman

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Ohio is considering legislation that would ban abortion, even before viability, if the reason for the termination is that the fetus has Down syndrome. On the surface, the law seems blatantly unconstitutional: The U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed a woman’s basic right to be free of any “undue burden” on terminating her pregnancy before viability. And no one doubts that the proposed law is intended as part of a broader legal attack on Roe v. Wade. Yet on closer examination, the legal issue is more complicated. Seven states have laws banning abortion aimed at selecting the sex of a child. These laws are arguably constitutional, and haven’t been struck down by the courts. The argument in favor of those laws is that the state has a compelling interest in combating sex discrimination. It seems possible that countering discrimination against those with Down syndrome is a compelling interest on par with combating discrimination against women.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Who is blowing up Egypt? Thursday's car bombing in Cairo, which destroyed a national security force building and injured dozens, will be just a blip on the international headlines. But the bombing, along with a string of similar attacks, matters existentially in Egypt, where it's the latest episode in a mounting campaign since the army deposed elected president Mohamed Mursi in a coup d'etat two years ago. The answer, so far at least, isn't what you might expect -- or what Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi's government would have you believe. There's little evidence that the attacks are coming from the Muslim Brotherhood, the now-outlawed party of the former president. Instead they seem mostly to be coming from far more radical jihadi forces based in the Sinai desert, who have recently been identifying themselves with Islamic State. Indeed, Islamic State claimed responsibility for the latest attack.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: When I was a student in a private religious school, I looked with envy on the First Amendment rights of public school children, who couldn’t, I imagined, be disciplined for what they said off campus. Now a divided U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit has held that I was wrong. According to the appeals court, a student can be suspended for posting rap lyrics on Facebook and YouTube that threatened a teacher at the school, because the speech was predictably disruptive. Depending on how Thursday's decision is interpreted, it could be used to limit students’ off-campus political speech in cases where no threat existed at all.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Iraq's prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, is taking severe steps to rid himself of his troublesome predecessor, Nuri al-Maliki. On the heels of a government shakeup, the latest move is a parliamentary report blaming Maliki and many of his political and military leaders for the fall of Mosul to Islamic State last summer. The report is going to be referred to a public prosecutor -- which means Abadi may be plotting a criminal prosecution. Maliki is fighting back, issuing a public statement repudiating the report. Given that Maliki had more domestic support than Abadi when the U.S., with grudging Iranian acquiescence, forced Maliki out of office, it’s no surprise that Abadi would like to consolidate his authority by purging Maliki completely.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The death on Saturday of Julian Bond, a leading 1960s civil rights leader who became chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, raises a deep question about contemporary U.S. politics: Where are today’s young Julian Bonds? Why isn’t there a clear and identifiable national black leadership for the under-50 generation?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In a weird new Cool War twist, Washington is demanding that China bring home agents it sent secretly to the U.S. to pressure corrupt Chinese officials and businessmen to return home and be punished. The shoe's on the other foot for the U.S., which has in the past frequently sent its own operatives to other countries without permission to grab not just terrorists but criminals, too. But the turnabout isn't what's most striking about this episode. Rather, the most important thing about China's secret efforts is why China thinks they're necessary at all.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Should the Jews have a pope? For most of the last 2,000 years, the answer has been “no.” Rabbinic authority has been decentralized, with each community choosing its own religious leaders to follow. But now Israel’s Chief Rabbinate is seeking to monopolize and centralize control over Jewish law through the power of the state of Israel. A few Orthodox rabbis are fighting back, like those who announced a new conversion court this week. Because Israel won’t recognize the court, the battle is going to be joined in earnest.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It’s been 150 years since U.S. law allowed masters to rape enslaved girls and women. Almost all modern Muslim societies banned slavery in the last century. So why is Islamic State turning back the clock, actively embracing and promoting enslavement of Yazidi women, thereby enabling them to be raped under one interpretation of classical Islamic law? Islamic State’s goal isn’t primarily about money or sex, but about sending the message that they are creating an Islamic utopia, following the practices of the era of the Prophet Muhammad. They want to go back in time, to the days of the earliest Muslims and the Prophet’s companions. The more medieval the practice, the more they like it.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It must be good news that Iraq’s parliament passed Prime Minister Haidar Al-Abadi’s anti-corruption reforms this week -- right? As with most things in Iraq, the answer isn’t as simple as it appears on the surface. In the abstract, it’s a nice idea for Iraq to stop dividing the spoils of government office among its denominational and ethnic factions. But that structure, with all its obvious flaws and faults, was built into the DNA of the Iraqi constitution for a reason: to help quell Sunni Arab fears that the Shiite majority, in collusion with the Kurdish minority, would dominate the Sunnis in perpetuity and refuse to share oil revenue.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It’s more than a little eerie to hear that authorities have declared a state of emergency in Ferguson, Missouri. The state of emergency, aka the state of siege, casts a long shadow over the history of government attempts to produce and maintain public order. States of emergency are the favored tool of dictators and would-be dictators who want to suspend regular, constitutional procedures. Their invocation often heralds a crackdown on civil liberties. In the case of St. Louis County, the reality is more complicated. The declared state of emergency does in fact give the elected county executive, Steve Stenger, almost absolute authority to declare a curfew and thereby order arrests and end protests.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. What counts as discrimination? In our post-Ferguson era of heightened awareness of disparate racial treatment by police, no domestic question is more pressing. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit has just addressed it in the context of a Texas voter identification law -- and gave a measured, socially astute answer. The court held that there wasn’t sufficient evidence to say that the law requiring all voters to show an acceptable ID was intentionally racist. But it said the effect of the law nonetheless was racially discriminatory -- because it made it disproportionately harder for blacks and Latinos to vote than for whites.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. A goodly portion of the Washington legal establishment has filed a friend of the court brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse the conviction of a securities fraudster. But the court shouldn’t take the bait, or the case. The court doesn’t, and shouldn’t, engage in what it calls error correction, except maybe in death penalty cases. And the Washington lawyers, who know this perfectly well, aren’t on board primarily to establish a principle. They’re engaged in a low-stakes process of mutual benefit that's well-known to legal insiders but, if successful, would amount to a distortion of the court’s processes on behalf of fancy -- and expensive -- former government lawyers.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry travels to Egypt on Sunday to renew the “strategic dialogue” between the countries that was cut off in 2009. From the standpoint of long-term U.S. national security interests, the renewal is a mistake. Leave aside Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi’s bad and worsening record on human rights and the trumped up convictions of Muslim Brotherhood leaders and rank-and-file. Forget the tragic message that the short-lived American support for Egyptian democracy is now thoroughly dead. What’s really troubling about the U.S.’s cozying up to Sisi is that it robs the American side of any leverage it might have with Egypt to pursue regional security goals, such as the creation of a stable Sunni coalition to defeat Islamic State.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The Taliban's smooth and rapid transition after their acknowledgment of Mullah Omar's death sends a strong message: They are afraid of the potential rise of Islamic State in Afghanistan if they fail to project unity. That reality should be useful to the U.S. government as it tries to negotiate a transition deal with the Afghan government and the Taliban. It's still true that the Taliban can demand something close to de facto control as part of the deal. But now, the Taliban have an incentive to talk that didn't exist before the rise of Islamic State. They have something to lose if the country devolves into congeries of competing warlord-controlled territories.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The upcoming decision by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on whether to break ties with the Boy Scouts of America over the admission of gay scoutmasters matters to the Scouts because, as of 2013, LDS-affiliates make up 17 percent of its membership. But the decision matters much more for the Mormon church itself. Throughout its history, the church has striven to integrate into American society while simultaneously preserving its distinctness. Scouting has been an important vector for LDS integration into mainstream American life. Replacing it with a church-run global substitute would mark a watershed turn away from integration and toward separation.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. I’m relieved that the nightmare of Jonathan Pollard’s imprisonment is about to be over. Not because I feel any sympathy whatsoever for the convicted spy who will be paroled in November after spending 30 years in prison. No, what relieves me is that, once he’s freed, we’ll be spared the spectacle of respectable American Jewish leaders calling for his early release. Those requests have been harmful to the principle that American Jews can be totally loyal Americans and also care about Israel. The end of this whole shameful episode is therefore cause not for celebration, but for relief.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Boston’s world-class universities and hospitals make it a globally significant metropolis. But its residents have rejected the cosmopolitan dream of hosting the 2024 Summer Olympics, causing the U.S. Olympic Committee to cut ties with the city Monday. The public intransigence wasn’t just an expression of fiscal caution. It was something deeper, a self-conscious embrace of provincialism as a value. And that raises a fascinating question: In a globalizing world, is there a place to be proudly provincial?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It’s been almost a century since T.E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt kicked the Ottomans out of Syria. Now the Turks are coming back, this time with U.S. air support, in a plan to establish a 60-mile-long buffer zone on the Syrian side of the border between the two countries. If the creation of a new mini-state within the borders of a Middle Eastern state seems worrisome, that’s because it is.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Turkey’s airstrikes against Islamic State and its decision to allow U.S. warplanes to operate from its air bases are in direct response to terrorist attacks in the Turkish town of Suruc earlier in the week. The cause-and-effect relationship highlights what’s becoming a central strategic dilemma for Islamic State. Ideologically, the organization embraces the jihadi techniques developed by al-Qaeda, which call for suicide bombings against civilians within regimes deemed to be the enemy. Practically, however, Islamic State’s best chance of survival as a quasi-sovereign entity is to leave its Sunni neighbors alone in the hopes they won’t provide the ground troops that would be necessary to defeat the militant group.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Should Denmark prosecute a 90-year-old Dane who volunteered as a Nazi concentration-camp guard more than 70 years ago? The question isn’t hypothetical: The Simon Wiesenthal Center has presented Danish authorities with a dossier urging the prosecution of Helmuth Leif Rasmussen, who by his own account was present at the Bobruisk camp in 1942-43 when 1,400 Jews were killed there.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It's becoming increasingly clear that the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, isn't going to be closed during President Barack Obama's administration -- or beyond, despite the administration's efforts. That raises a deep question about foreign policy and the rule of law: What if Guantanamo never closes, and some of its detainees remain there for the rest of their lives?