Noah Feldman

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Does the new version of the bill giving Congress a vote on the Iran nuclear agreement -- a bill which President Barack Obama has agreed to sign -- shift the constitutional balance of power when it comes to foreign agreements? At first glance, it looks as if it might: Obama initially declared that he could make an executive agreement with Iran that evaded Congress. Now he has agreed to sign a law that gives Congress the chance to review the deal before it goes into effect and block it if there are enough votes to override a presidential veto. This looks like a restraint on the president's untrammeled executive power in foreign affairs. On second glance, however, the bill seems to be more symbolic than practical.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Is the European Union out to get Google? You might think so, considering that EU regulators are poised to bring anti-competitive-conduct charges against the search giant, while U.S. regulators happily settled their differences with Google a couple of years ago. Add the European regulatory efforts to force Google to let people eliminate certain permanent-seeming records of their past conduct, and you might think there's some deeper cultural explanation, such as old world skepticism of new world technology.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The big murder trial that’s been obsessing Bostonians has ended with a guilty verdict. No, you're not having déjà vu. Today's jury decision came in the case of Aaron Hernandez, the former New England Patriots star tight end. Hernandez was convicted of murdering Odin Lloyd, a semiprofessional football player who was also dating Hernandez's fiancée’s sister. Although the motive remains shady, it seems possible that the 2013 murder was connected to the still unresolved criminal charge that Hernandez killed two other people the year before -- strangers who accidentally insulted him in a nightclub. If that charge also turns out to be true, then Hernandez killed almost as many people as the Tsarnaev brothers who perpetrated the Boston Marathon bombing two years ago today.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. So-called conversion therapies to make gay people straight are based on poor science or none, and U.S. President Barack Obama was right to condemn them. But the president was wrong to encourage the passage of more laws like the one in California that bans the use of such therapy on minors. Legislatures, whether state or federal, make terrible judges of the scientific validity of medical therapies. And setting a precedent for lawmakers to prohibit treatments because they consider them to be morally mistaken is even worse. It opens the door to the legislation of morality in the guise of protecting public health and safety.

An op-d by Noah Feldman. The correct ethical response to the video of Officer Michael Slager shooting Walter Scott in the back is to condemn the crime -- with one exception. The exception is Slager’s attorney, who has an ethical obligation as a lawyer to defend his client, not to abandon him or harm him by a public act of distancing. Yet in an interview with the Daily Beast, Slager’s lawyer did just that, dropping his client like a hot potato and strongly implying that Slager either had been set on a course of perjury or was simply too repulsive to represent. Obviously, the overwhelming cause for outrage here is the apparent murder of an unarmed, fleeing black man by a police officer in North Charleston, South Carolina. But the whole point of having defense attorneys is that they’re especially necessary when the whole world considers their client immediately guilty. It’s therefore worth spending a moment examining what Slager's lawyer did and said -- and why it was an ethical mistake for him to act like any other ordinarily moral person.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It was sleeting hard in Boston on Wednesday afternoon as the jury returned a guilty verdict on all 30 counts against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev for carrying out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing that killed an 8-year-old and two women and wounded at least 260 people. Somehow the weather seems appropriate, even though it’s after Easter. Throughout this intensely cold, snowy winter in Boston, the specter of the Tsarnaev trial has been a constant and unwelcome reminder that for all its liberalism and toleration, this city isn’t immune from the troubles that plague the rest of the world.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. If you’d never heard the acronym AIIB until this week, don’t blame yourself. Strictly speaking, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank doesn't even exist yet. But the Chinese-created alternative to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund is turning out to be extremely important. More than 40 countries have applied to join, almost all of them close U.S. allies -- and they've applied despite aggressive American efforts to discourage them. The upstart bank is already emerging as a major foreign policy victory for China, one all the sweeter because it's a direct diplomatic win over the U.S. It raises a very basic question: What's going on here? How can nations that depend on the American superpower for their security -- including protection against China -- so cavalierly ignore U.S. interests in favor of the only global state that can credibly challenge U.S. superpower status?

Four years after pro-democratic protests and uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa, known as the Arab Spring, offered hope of a new era of calm and stability across the region, much of it has plummeted into chaos, and at a quickening pace. Bloody conflicts and civil wars bedevil Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen; diplomatic ties have frayed between the United States and Israel over Iran and the Occupied Territories; and the terrorist group Islamic State, or ISIS, is proving durable in its brutal campaign to create a caliphate in Syria, Iraq, and beyond. It is a time of historic political, social, and military transformation in the region and one that is likely to continue, Harvard analysts say...Noah Feldman ’92, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School (HLS), said, “The violence now, much of it is centering around locations where the breakdown of sovereignty is near complete. And that’s historically unprecedented.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. When your state breaks federal law in a way that affects you, can you sue in federal court to make it do the right thing? On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court made doing so substantially harder. In a case involving private health-care providers in Idaho, the justices held that the health workers can’t sue Idaho -- even though the state was paying them less than required under federal Medicaid law. If this sounds weird to you, the fault isn’t yours. The problem lies with the version of federalism that underlies the 5-4 decision. Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the court’s controlling opinion, bent over backward to say that the Constitution shouldn’t be read to provide an automatic right to sue your state when it violates federal law.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Expanding the Rhodes scholarships to China is a great idea -- and not because China under President Xi Jinping is on its way to becoming a constitutional democracy. Since Cecil Rhodes created the scholarship (of which I was a recipient) in his will, its grand aspiration -- which some might find overblown -- has always been to reconcile countries that might otherwise be in conflict.

Closing arguments will be heard Monday in the Marathon Bombing trial. Today, the defense rested after calling just four witnesses. Adam Reilly was in the courtroom again today. Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman, Rev. Jeffrey Brown, of Roxbury’s Twelfth Baptist Church, and Boston Public Radio co-host Margery Eagan discuss.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. An old saw has it that “Arab unity” is an oxymoron on par with “military intelligence.” Read not as racial essentialism but as a critique of pan-Arabism, the observation has been true in the modern era. Yet Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi’s announcement of an agreement “in principle” by the Arab League to create a joint military force may just be different. Because Islamic State is unlikely to be defeated by air power alone, the U.S. should probably welcome the step -- as should Israel.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The U.S. Supreme Court in its infinite wisdom says that executing a person of reduced mental capacity is cruel and unusual punishment. On Monday, it took up the question of whether a convicted defendant should get a separate hearing, apart from the death penalty determination, to ascertain what the court still calls mental retardation. Under the surface, however, the case is really about something else: As the Supreme Court chips away at the death penalty, should it multiply procedural hurdles to make it harder and harder to administer?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Pregnant women won a somewhat surprising victory at the U.S. Supreme Court today. The court’s four liberals got help from Chief Justice John Roberts, who joined the majority opinion by Justice Stephen Breyer, and a surprise concurrence in the judgment from Justice Samuel Alito, who rarely crosses over to the liberal side. Roberts and Alito may each have had his own reason for breaking conservative ranks. At issue in the case was the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. That law prohibits discrimination based on pregnancy and childbirth. Then, in a separate provision, it requires employers to treat pregnant women the same “as other persons not so affected but similar in their ability or inability to work.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Imagine that someone has wronged you, and you sue them. Then the government magically appears in court and asks that your suit be dismissed because, for reasons it won't tell you, state secrets might be dredged up in the course of the litigation. You have no idea what they're talking about. But after secret discussions with the judge from which both you and the defendant are excluded, the court dismisses your suit. This Kafkaesque scenario couldn’t happen in the U.S., right? Not until Monday, it couldn’t. But a federal judge in the Southern District of New York just did exactly this, dismissing a defamation suit by Greek shipping magnate Victor Restis against a shady advocacy group called United Against Nuclear Iran.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. What’s the difference between an opinion and a fact? That sounds like a question of philosophy, or language, or maybe social science -- but it’s also a highly practical question of law, one the U.S. Supreme Court decided Tuesday in a case about registration statements filed by issuing companies under the Securities and Exchange Act. The court tried to frame a compromise between the interests of corporations that issue securities and securities class-action lawyers, whose job it is to keep the corporations honest and get rich in the process. The compromise had two parts.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Critics of the Supreme Court's conservative wing like to say it’s instinctively pro-business. The justices on Tuesday will test that proposition in a fascinating case about whether bankruptcy law instructs judges to void liens on underwater properties. On one side lie the interests of Bank of America, which is the petitioner and doesn't want the loans to be “stripped off,” that is, voided. On the other side is the plain statutory text, which says they should be. The poetic twist is that, in a very similar 1992 case, the Supreme Court ignored the plain text and held in favor of the banks -- over the forceful dissent of one Justice Antonin Scalia.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The personalized license plate is as American as … well, ever seen a plate with a design celebrating your favorite soda in any other country? Today, not for the first time, the U.S. Supreme Court takes up the equally quirky American question of free speech in the license plate context. At issue is a decision by Texas to block an organization from using the Confederate battle flag as a license plate logo. Many free-speech advocates think the state shouldn’t be able to pick and choose what symbols should appear. Texas wants to exclude a flag that has come to symbolize the violent repression of black Americans. Who’s right? There’s a legal answer to this question, but it turns out to be surprisingly complicated.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Who needs law school? For centuries, the answer in the English-speaking world was: no one. You prepared for the bar by serving as an apprentice or an intern alongside practicing lawyers. Sure, you had to read a lot of cases. At first, they probably made no sense. But over time, you learned by watching and doing to connect the decisions in the books with real cases and real clients. Today there’s renewed talk of returning to a world where you could join the bar after extended internships rather than formal legal study. I’m a law professor, so you’d expect me to defend the current system. Before I do, however, let me make a big admission: Law school isn’t really necessary for lawyers or their clients...Yet law school is absolutely essential -- not for lawyers with clients, but for our society as a whole. The reason has everything to do with what makes law distinct as a social phenomenon.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. When the front gate to the Tunisian national parliament was locked, during my visits from 2012 to 2014, my research associate and I discovered we could walk around to the back gate, which was always open so the public could access the national museum. Eventually we realized we could even park there, no questions asked. Unfortunately, terrorists noticed this, too -- and 17 tourists were killed Wednesday in Tunis during an attack on the Bardo, as the parliament-museum complex is called. This loss of life is more than a blow to the Tunisian tourism industry or the newly elected government. It represents a loss of innocence for the one country that has emerged from the Arab Spring as a constitutional democracy. Tunisia will now have to admit that it has a homegrown terrorist movement that wants to undermine the vibrant new institutions the country is so justly proud of having created.