Noah R. Feldman

Harvard Law professor, Axios’ resident legal scholar, and Bloomberg Opinion Columnist Noah Feldman is one of the great legal minds and public intellectuals of our time. Called “one of the stars of his generation” (Justice Elena Kagan) and one of the “75 most influential people of the 21st century” (Esquire), Feldman specializes in the Supreme Court, philosophy, politics, and religion. 

In his weekly Bloomberg column, he provides real-time analysis of the top legal cases of the day and their impact on our lives. His podcast, Deep Background, brings together a cross-section of expert guests to explore the historical, scientific, legal, and cultural context of the biggest stories in the news. He is the author of 10 books, including his latest, The Broken Constitution: Lincoln.  Named one of the three most influential contemporary idea-drivers by New York magazine, Feldman speaks widely on power, ethics, international affairs, civil discourse, the Supreme court, Founding Fathers, and free speech in the age of social media. He also enjoys speaking on cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies. Having described politics and religion as technologies, and constitutions as blueprints for how groups of people govern themselves in a common enterprise, he recently commented: “To understand what will happen to crypto, you need to understand how constitutions work and how they fail.”  Slavery, and the Refounding of America. Publishers Weekly called Feldman’s Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Justices “a first-rate work of narrative history that succeeds in bringing the intellectual and political battles of the post-Roosevelt Court vividly to life.” In 2020, Feldman released The Arab Winter: A Tragedy, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. The New York Times Book Review called his previous book, The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President,  “illuminating and absorbing.” Feldman’s other books include The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State, Divided by God, After Jihad, and Cool War: The Future of Global Competition, a thought-provoking look at U.S.-China relations.

A Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and  Senior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard, Feldman teaches constitutional and international law. His expertise includes the history of legal theory, Jewish and Islamic law and philosophy, and the separation of church and state. He speaks four languages, including Arabic and Hebrew, and is the director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law at Harvard Law. Feldman is a graduate of Harvard, finishing first in his class, and earned a doctorate in Islamic thought from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice David Souter and served as an advisor during the drafting of the Iraqi and Tunisian constitutions.