Noah Feldman

Noah Feldman
Noah R. Feldmanis an American author and the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
CountryUnited States of America
antiquity breeds containing discount distant driving events joseph less mythic occurred reasonable seem tendency time
What is driving the tendency to discount Joseph Smith's revelations is not that they seem less reasonable than those of Moses; it is that the book containing them is so new. When it comes to prophecy, antiquity breeds authenticity. Events in the distant past, we tend to think, occurred in sacred, mythic time.
associate belongs itself maybe official people religion saying sovereign state
How can you have the religion of the sovereign be the religion of the state if the sovereign belongs to many religions? And it's at that point, I think, historically, that you start to see people saying maybe the state should not associate itself with any religion. Maybe there shouldn't be any official religion.
attacks backing expansion extend further george judicial national power republican sought taken
The administration of George W. Bush, emboldened by the Sept. 11 attacks and the backing of a Republican Congress, has sought to further extend presidential power over national security. Most of the expansion has taken place in secret, making Congressional or judicial supervision particularly difficult.
allies considered constitution developed justices theories totally
FDR's justices were allies while he was alive, but after he died, they developed four totally different theories of what the Constitution is, two of which are considered conservative and two of which are considered liberal.
bill bringing brought further gingrich govern held house newt power pushing remaining shaped tendency
The 1994 elections that brought Newt Gingrich to power in the House decisively shaped the remaining years of Bill Clinton's presidency, pushing him further to the right and bringing out his latent tendency to govern every day as if an election were being held the next.
almost among anathema became move passage similar sole until whom
The Mormons' passage from bugbears of the Republican Party to its stalwarts may be analogized to a similar move among middle-class white Southerners, to whom the Republican Party was anathema until the 1970s and '80s, after which it became almost the sole representative.
decade major relation
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the major international question was the relation between Islam and democracy.
countries democratic seems stop
It seems strange to the rest of the world, but we Americans can't seem to stop talking about how other countries should be democratic like we are.
constitution expressed george governed piece policies provides strongest
The modern presidency, as expressed in the policies of the administration of George W. Bush, provides the strongest piece of evidence that we are governed by a fundamentally different Constitution from that of the framers.
couple democratic executive hundred large republic run states took united
The transformation of the United States from a traditional republic to a democratic nation run in large measure by a single executive took a couple of hundred years.
affected clear elected historical preserve vice wants
Even a lame-duck president can be affected by a clear midterm message if he wants to see his vice president elected and preserve his historical legacy.
alongside considers curriculum followed itself rigorous secular studied
The yeshiva where I studied considers itself modern Orthodox, not ultra-Orthodox. We followed a rigorous secular curriculum alongside traditional Talmud and Bible study.
memories self practice
Marriage is the most obvious public practice about which information is readily available. When combined with the traditional Jewish concern for continuity and self-preservation - itself only intensified by the memory of the Holocaust - marriage becomes the sine qua non of social membership in the modern Orthodox community.
blow rights self
We like democracy because why? The pathologies of the U.S. version are so obvious in the aftermath of the latest averted crisis that we need to ask ourselves whether it’s worth it - and why electoral democracy hasn’t self-destructed before. Should Tunisians or Egyptians opt for the Chinese model, where rational autocrats may restrict rights, but no one threatens to blow up world markets in the name of an 18th-century tax protest?