Noah Feldman

Noah Raam Feldman (born May 22, 1970) is an American legal scholar and academic.

He is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and chairman of the Harvard Society of Fellows.

He is the author of 10 books, host of the podcast Deep Background, and a public affairs columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.

He was formerly a contributing writer for The New York Times.

Feldman's work is focused on ethics and constitutional law with an emphasis on innovation, free speech, law and religion, and history.

Feldman grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in an Orthodox Jewish home.

Feldman studied Near Eastern languages and civilizations at Harvard University.

In 1990, as a junior, he was the Massachusetts recipient of the Harry S. Truman Scholarship.

Feldman graduated first in his class in 1992 with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, and Phi Beta Kappa membership.

Upon graduating from Harvard, Feldman was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Christ Church, Oxford.

In 1994, he earned a Doctor of Philosophy in Oriental Studies (focusing on Aristotle's Ethics and its Islamic reception).

While at Oxford, he was a member of the Oxford University L'Chaim Society.

Feldman then returned to the United States to attend Yale Law School, where he was the book review editor of the Yale Law Journal.

He graduated with a Juris Doctor in 1997.

According to Harvard Magazine, Feldman is a "hyperpolyglot."

He is fluent in English, Hebrew, Arabic, and French.

He also speaks conversational Korean, and reads Greek, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish and Aramaic.

After graduating from law school, Feldman was a law clerk for Chief Judge Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1997 to 1998, then for Justice David Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1998 to 1999.

In 2001, Feldman joined the faculty of New York University Law School, where he became a tenured full professor in 2005 and was appointed Cecilia Goetz Professor of Law in 2006.

In 2003, he was named senior constitutional advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.

In that capacity he advised on the drafting of the Transitional Administrative Law, the precursor to the Iraqi constitution.

He was a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine from 2005 to 2011.

In 2007, Feldman joined the Harvard Law School faculty as the Bemis Professor of International Law, teaching classes on the First Amendment, the Constitution, and the international order.

In 2010, he became a senior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, and in 2020, he was named chair.

A Harvard Magazine profile describes the Society as such: "The values it represents to [Feldman] have shaped his career: 'convivial intellectual community with people from many very different backgrounds; interdisciplinary creativity and collaboration; openness to new, unorthodox ideas; pursuing solutions to long-term questions that really matter for the world; generosity to colleagues and across generations; nurturing originality to encourage risk-taking; and belief in sustained, in-person conversation as a central element of the good intellectual life.'"

He is the founding director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish & Israeli Law at Harvard Law School.

Since 2012, he has been a regular columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.

He also regularly contributes essays to The New York Review of Books about constitutional topics and the Supreme Court.

In 2014, he was appointed the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

Feldman was a senior adjunct fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and was previously an adjunct fellow at New America Foundation.

Feldman has published nine nonfiction books and two case books.

They include The Broken Constitution, Divided By God, What We Owe Iraq, Cool War, Scorpions, The Three Lives of James Madison and The Arab Winter.

Reviewing The Arab Winter in The New York Times, Robert F. Worth called Feldman's thesis "bold" and that Feldman "spins out its ramifications in fascinating and persuasive ways."

Reviewing The Broken Constitution, James Oakes concludes that Feldman ignores "the voluminous historical evidence that would have added some much-needed nuance to his thoroughly unpersuasive analysis."

Since 2019, Feldman has been the host of the podcast Deep Background, which is produced by Pushkin Industries.

Deep Background focuses on the historical, scientific, legal, and cultural context underlying the news, with a focus on power and ethics.

He has interviewed Malcolm Gladwell, Laurie R. Santos, and Marc Lipsitch, among others.

Feldman advised Facebook on the creation of its Oversight Board, whose members were announced in June 2020.

According to Feldman, the purpose of the Oversight Board is to protect and ensure freedom of expression on the platform by creating an independent body to review Facebook's most important content moderation decisions.

A 2020 profile in Harvard magazine describes the genesis of the board: "'On a bike ride one day, [Feldman] thought: Facebook and other social media are under a lot of pressure to avoid outcomes that are morally repugnant. What if they addressed the problem as governments do, giving independent bodies functioning like courts the authority to decide what content is acceptable and what is not? Social media themselves, he decided, should find ways to protect free expression—and he made a proposal to Facebook, the world’s largest social-media platform, with more than 2.6 billion users who send out an average of 115 billion messages a day: 'To put it simply: we need a Supreme Court of Facebook.''"