Noah Feldman

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Antioxidants got you down? They would if you were POM Wonderful LLC, which makes pomegranate and blueberry juices that have to compete with the Coca-Cola Co. Coca-Cola makes its own juice product that mentions pomegranates and blueberries on the label but has only 0.3 percent of the former and 0.2 percent of the latter. POM sued Coke alleging false advertising. Coke replied that the government regulates food labeling, and that its label was fine. Who should win?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Bankruptcy courts are the mark of an advanced legal society. Think of the alternatives. Debt-slavery is inhumane. Debtors’ prison is inefficient. And breaking a trader’s bench and banning him from the market doesn’t get anybody’s assets back. But how far should the jurisdiction of special bankruptcy courts reach? The U.S. Supreme Court has been grappling with this question for several years; today, in Executive Benefits Insurance Agency v. Arkison, it came a step closer to a common-sense answer.

The al-Qaeda-inspired Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) announced Friday that a Shariah-based system of governance will be imposed in Mosul and other cities and towns in Iraq that have been overtaken by militants…“Today’s advocates of Shariah as the source of law are not actually recommending the adoption of a comprehensive legal code derived from or dictated by Shariah — because nothing so comprehensive has ever existed in Islamic history,” says Noah Feldman…a law professor at Harvard University...“To the Islamist politicians who advocate it or for the public that supports it, Shariah generally means something else. It means establishing a legal system in which God’s law sets the ground rules, authorizing and validating everyday laws passed by an elected legislature.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Scratch a patent-law expert and you’ll find a Supreme Court critic. Most patent lawyers I know disdain the Supreme Court, or at least think it should butt out of their disputes and let the Federal Circuit, made up of experienced patent-law judges, do its own thing. Today in a pair of unanimous decisions reversing the Federal Circuit, the Supreme Court made it clear the contempt is mutual. It not only slapped down the specialist court, but also implied strongly that the lower court has run amok, making patent law based on its own policy preferences and not what the patent laws actually say.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The case is out of Agatha Christie: Twenty-four separate times, Carol Anne Bond spread an arsenic-based compound and potassium dichromate on the car door, mailbox and doorknob of the woman who was both her closest friend and, it turned out, her husband’s lover. All she managed was a single burned thumb; the case would never have reached the U.S. Supreme Court had not overreaching prosecutors charged Bond with a chemical weapons violation. Today, the court ducked the potential international implications by holding that it wasn’t “utterly clear” that the chemical weapons law covered Bond’s conduct. Unfortunately, to reach that common-sense conclusion, the court felt it had to invent a new quasi-constitutional doctrine with potentially far-reaching implications. The whole sordid tale can tell us something important about how the court does its business today when interpreting statutes.

While friends and family sprawled out on the warm grass in sandals and colorful sundresses, the Connecticut College Class of 2014 lined up on Tempel Green Sunday morning in somber-looking black gowns. Keynote commencement speaker Noah Feldman, an international law professor at Harvard, told graduates that the path that follows those scary questions is never easy.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Speed-reading Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in the prayer case decided Monday, I got carried away. For years I’ve been frustrated with Thomas’s idiosyncratic argument that the establishment clause of the First Amendment was actually intended not only to bar establishment of a national religion but also to protect state establishments of religion. As I wrote on Tuesday and at much greater length in an academic article and in a book, this view is wrong and historically unsupported. No state admitted to having an established religion by 1789. The New England states facilitated local funding of ministers, but they didn’t call it an “establishment,” which was already a dirty word. And Thomas’s idea of protecting state establishments was, unsurprisingly, unmentioned in any state ratifying convention or in Congress when the clause was being proposed and discussed. In short, there’s no evidence in support of the view, and lots against it.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Aristotle said that when a general law doesn’t fit a particular case, the proper course is to rectify the law so it does fit. Today, in the last oral argument of this term, the U.S. Supreme Court grappled with his advice in the case of Limelight Networks v. Akamai Technologies.

In a week of many developments in the world of law, Harvard Law School faculty were online, in print, and on-the-air offering analyses and opinions.

In a week of many developments in the world of law, Harvard Law School faculty were online, in print, and on-the-air offering analyses and opinions.

Over the past week, a number of HLS faculty members shared their viewpoints on events in the news. Here are some excerpts.