• WORLD

  Supreme Court forces nationalism into movie theatres

  News, Noah Feldman, Published on 05/12/2016

  » Amid rising Hindu nationalism, the Supreme Court of India has ordered theatres to play the national anthem before films and directed moviegoers to stand at attention -- no excuses. The Indian constitution is a wonder of the world, but this decision undercuts free-speech and individual rights at a moment when the country can ill-afford it. The court, which has the final word in interpreting the constitution, can still reverse itself. And it should, because the court's job is to protect rights, not to impose duties and obligations when the legislature has not done so.

• OPINION

  The pros and cons of Trump's random foreign policy

  News, Noah Feldman, Published on 20/03/2018

  » Suppose President Donald Trump's foreign policy is random. I mean really random: Like random luck, designed only in so far as to fluctuate wildly between different, opposing strategic views.

• OPINION

  Trump's anti-nuclear playbook looks like Obama's

  News, Noah Feldman, Published on 10/08/2017

  » Imposing United Nations sanctions on North Korea is the first major foreign policy success of the Donald Trump administration. The effort has a chance of working -- provided Mr Trump keeps following a model borrowed from president Barack Obama's dealings with Iran. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And the only way to pressure a nuclear or near-nuclear power to the table is with economic sanctions that weaken the regime without threatening its existence.

• OPINION

  Trump's self-destructive bravado

  News, Noah Feldman, Published on 02/02/2017

  » The Monday night massacre -- as President Donald Trump's firing of acting Attorney-General Sally Yates was inevitably called -- lacked the grand madness of Richard Nixon's famous firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox on Oct 20, 1973, which prompted the resignations of the attorney-general and the deputy attorney-general.

• OPINION

  Trump's ignoble attack on judiciary

  News, Noah Feldman, Published on 07/02/2017

  » It's no surprise that President Donald Trump initiated a Twitter attack Saturday on federal judge James Robart for freezing the executive order on immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries. The ultimate fate of the order will depend on proceedings in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which denied the government's emergency request to reinstate the ban, and possibly even the US Supreme Court. But because judges issue rulings, not press releases, it's also up to civil society and the news media to defend the judge and the rule of law from the president's bluster.

• OPINION

  The presidency can bend to fit Trump's personality

  News, Noah Feldman, Published on 29/11/2016

  » Donald Trump is inheriting a more powerful presidency than any of his predecessors. And if history is any guide, he will seek to expand the power of the office. But how will he do it? One clue lies in noticing how the personalities of the last two presidents were reflected in their techniques of expansion. Barack Obama's administration took a very different route to its expansion of executive authority than did George W Bush's -- and Mr Trump's will probably be different still.

• OPINION

  'Resistance' does not equate to crisis

  News, Noah Feldman, Published on 07/09/2018

  » On the surface, it sounds a bit like a coup d'état. An anonymous senior official in Donald Trump's administration has written an op-ed article for The New York Times saying the official is part of the "resistance" to the president from within. But don't get taken in by the hype. What the writer describes is a lot like what happens in many, probably most administrations: Officials who share some but not all the president's goals use bureaucratic tools to avoid or delay implementing presidential initiatives they don't like.

• OPINION

  Manafort indictment kicks off a complicated story

  News, Noah Feldman, Published on 01/11/2017

  » So now we know how this game of Clue starts: Paul Manafort with a wire transfer in the parlour. But Democrats who are getting revved up for special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation to follow the money from Russia to Donald Trump's campaign shouldn't get too excited, at least not yet.

• OPINION

  The fit deserve the right to serve

  News, Noah Feldman, Published on 28/07/2017

  » A ban on transgender people serving in the US military would probably be unconstitutional under any circumstances. But President Donald Trump has pretty much guaranteed that courts would strike down such a ban by announcing it on Wednesday on Twitter, without any real justification.

• OPINION

  Comey's firing is a crisis of American rule of law

  News, Noah Feldman, Published on 11/05/2017

  » It's not a constitutional crisis. Technically, President Donald Trump was within his constitutional rights on Tuesday when he fired FBI Director James Comey. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is part of the executive branch, not an independent agency. But the firing did violate a powerful unwritten norm: that the director serves a 10-year, nonrenewable term and is fired only for good cause.

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