Noah Feldman
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Dr. Noah Feldman, D.Phil (Oxon), J.D. is an American author and professor of law at the New York University School of Law. As of Fall 2007, he will be leaving NYU and joining the faculty of Harvard Law School. He worked as an advisor in the early days of the Paul Bremer transitional team in Iraq for the writing of the country's then unwritten constitution (his advisory role, however, ended abruptly, and whether he quit or was fired has never been made clear.) Among Feldman's more dubious honors is the Most Beautiful Brainiac award from New York Magazine. He regularly contributes features and opinion pieces to The New York Times Magazine.
In general, Feldman is concerned with issues at the intersection of religion and politics. In America, this has a bearing on First Amendment questions of church and state and the role of religion both in government and in private life. In Iraq, Feldman's other area of specialty, the same reasoning leads him to support the creation of a democracy with Islamist elements. This last position has been lauded by some as a pragmatic and sensitive solution to the problems inherent in the creation of a new Iraqi government; [1] others have taken exception to the same idea, however, calling it naive to think that any of the various Islamist movements in the Middle East can produce a stable democracy. [2]
Feldman was a featured speaker, alongside noted Islamic authority Hamza Yusuf, in the lecture Islam & Democracy: Is a clash of civilisations inevitable?, which was subsequently released on DVD.
Noah Feldman is a graduate of Harvard University, Oxford University, Yale Law School, and Maimonides School. He won a Rhodes Scholarship and later served as a law clerk for Associate Justice David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court. He is fluent in English, Hebrew, Arabic and French.
Born into an Orthodox Jewish family, Feldman is married to Jeannie Suk, an assistant professor of law at Harvard, and has two children. He lives in Maine and New York City. He has two brothers: Simon Feldman, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Connecticut College, and Ezra Feldman, an MFA student at Cornell University.
[edit] Books
- After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (2003)
- What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building (2004)
- Divided By God: America's Church-State Problem - and What We Should Do About It (2005)
