Noah Feldman > Quotes

“To Douglas, the case turned on the purpose of the First Amendment. The judge had told the jury that in Chicago, it was unlawful to invite dispute. It followed that the conviction should be overturned. After all, he wrote, “a function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging.”49”
― Noah Feldman, Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices

“In 1984, Fred Korematsu went back to federal court, seeking to have his conviction voided retroactively on the theory that the government had withheld crucial facts from the judiciary. The court agreed with him. The Department of Justice and the Army, it found, had distorted the record to make it appear that there was a legitimate security concern.113 A few years later, Congress granted reparations of twenty thousand dollars to each Japanese-American who had been interned.”
― Noah Feldman, Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices

“The entire edifice of constitution building rested on a republican article of faith: in the people. Ultimately, the people would have to choose the government—and would have to vote it out of power if it oppressed them: “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men; so that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.”149”
― Noah Feldman, The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President

“Frankfurter worried that assigning to the Supreme Court the job of protecting liberal rights would relieve the public of the responsibility to protect basic rights on its own, through influencing the legislature. If the courts should become the institution charged with protecting rights, he feared, the public would cease to care about protecting rights itself. Legislators might enact laws that they knew to be unconstitutional, passing the buck to the courts in the expectation they would strike those laws down. What was more, the courts might eventually lose their legitimacy, since they would be seen as acting against the public, not in fulfillment of its most deeply held values. The right thing to do, therefore, under our basic constitutional structure, was to rely on the democratic polity to preserve rights, not for the courts to intervene.”
― Noah Feldman, Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices

“standpoint of the Constitution as it had existed until then, Lincoln’s proposed order was a fundamental violation—and pointed toward a fundamental restructuring. The Constitution had been born as a compromise. That compromise had been repeatedly updated and reaffirmed until the Civil War began. As it had evolved, the compromise Constitution protected slavery in order to preserve a union capable”
― Noah Feldman, The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America

“The elected Virginia convention of 1776 saw itself as engaged in the epochal act of founding a new polity based on the consent of the governed... The utopian impulse grew from the same political theory that the Virginians and other Americans relied on to justify dissolving their bonds of obligation to the [British] throne. Human beings, according to this view, were naturally free and equal. They possessed..."unalienable rights" that government existed to protect... Unlike any governments imagined before, the governments of the new states would rely for their justification on their capacity to protect individual rights--not their brute power to control territory and issue commands that would be obeyed.”
― Noah Feldman, The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President

“The liberal accepts the main outlines of our existing economic system as desirable and as destined to endure at least for some generations. He accepts and champions the right to use one’s talents and efforts to produce, acquire, and to keep property. And the right of capital to a fair return for its work. This means a definite rejection of communism, socialism, and fascism.”1”
― Noah Feldman, Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices

“Cyber attacks are not what makes the cool war 'cool.' As a strategic matter, they do not differ fundamentally from older tools of espionage and sabotage”
― Noah Feldman

“Many, probably most civilizations throughout history have conceptualized marriage as fulfilling a range of purposes potentially different from the deepest and truest love between people: functions like household partnership, companionship, familial alliance, procreation, and child rearing.”
― Noah Feldman, To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People