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
contradiction mass
Isn’t everyone’s life a mass of contradictions?
europeans experience unlike
Well-meaning Europeans sometimes argue that unlike the U.S., their countries are traditionally 'homogeneous' and have little experience with immigration.
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The practical core of democracy, defined functionally, is the peaceful exchange of power between different groups of powerful political players arranged in parties.
chair dealing define grand point religion wants word
I have a 2-year-old son, and I know I'm dealing with a big, grand word when I can't point to the thing when I define it. Right? If he wants to know what a chair is, I can point to the chair. If he wants to know what religion is, I can't point to anything in particular. The same is true of the state.
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.
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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.
capitalism extreme liberal people preserve regulation reject
During the New Deal, people thought to be liberal was to reject socialism on one extreme and fascism on the other, and to preserve capitalism through regulation and a social safety net.
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The world is littered with constitutions that have written guarantees of rights but that don't actually deliver rights. What differentiates the ones where rights are real from where rights are fake is that it's in the initial interests of the majority to actually deliver these rights.
advance becomes china chinese deeply largest leadership matters meaningful power pressure public status
The Chinese public is deeply nationalist, which matters to China's unelected political leadership as much as U.S. nationalism does to American politicians. As China becomes the world's largest economy, there is meaningful public pressure for its power status to advance in parallel. Any alternative would be humiliating.