Noah Feldman Joins Abortion Panel, Suffers Consequences Of His Own Actions
Hoist the petard!
Noah Feldman (webinar screencap via Twitter)
Harvard Law’s Noah Feldman joined a school webinar to discuss reproductive freedom in the post-Dobbslandscape. If you’re wondering why a law professor who took to the media to write lengthy articles explaining that Amy Coney Barrett Deserves To Be On The Supreme Court would be asked to opine on the legal hellscape brought upon us by *checks notes* Amy Coney Barrett’s vote, well, you’re apparently not alone!
The Zoom chat kicked off with the Q&A feature enabled. Harvard eventually closed the Q&A feature — can’t have speakers dealing with tough, on-point questions! — but thankfully folks preserved the record and it turned out that people felt compelled to ask about the pachyderm in the breakout room.
Navigating Financial Success by Avoiding Common Pitfalls and Maximizing Firm Performance
To be clear, Feldman absolutely said all of those things prompting this amazing follow-up question:
Sponsored
Is The Future Of Law Distributed? Lessons From The Tech Adoption Curve
Early Adopters Of Legal AI Gaining Competitive Edge In Marketplace
The Business Case For AI At Your Law Firm
The Business Case For AI At Your Law Firm
Feldman’s reply calls for the old Arrested Development Ron Howard narration: “It was not false.”
OK, in the interest of fairness, let’s take a second to revisit exactly what Feldman said. I’ll give him credit on the Kavanaugh article. At least in that piece Kavanaugh was already on the Court and he was just pitching him on becoming the new swing vote.
On the one hand, Kavanaugh is a politically astute and sophisticated judge who wants to matter. The only way for him to become a significant justice on the court as currently configured is to be the swing voter. If he consistently votes with the other conservatives, he becomes just one of five (or six) votes, without the power to control the law.
As the swing justice, he would often have the power to decide the law on his own. He would be able to influence both conservative and liberal justices in a wider range of cases, because they would know they needed him to win the big cases.
It didn’t happen, but it was actually a game effort to appeal to Kavanaugh’s ego to push him toward a better outcome.
That’s not the case in his mash note to ACB:
Sponsored
Legal AI: 3 Steps Law Firms Should Take Now
Navigating Financial Success by Avoiding Common Pitfalls and Maximizing Firm Performance
I know her to be a brilliant and conscientious lawyer who will analyze and decide cases in good faith, applying the jurisprudential principles to which she is committed. Those are the basic criteria for being a good justice. Barrett meets and exceeds them.
Feldman’s hanging his hat on the fact that amidst this lengthy recommendation letter he does note that Barrett would issue rulings he didn’t like. But what he doesn’t seem to get is that it’s also an option to not say anything at all.
Feldman’s pulling the Ricky Bobby “with all due respect” defense: just prefacing your article with a “I disagree with much of her judicial philosophy” doesn’t mean you can go on a public cheerleading tour. Indeed, that sort of posturing is arguably more morally objectionable because law professors willing to play the “I’m a liberal but let’s whitewash the hellscape” card know they’ll find a receptive audience and get quoted ad nauseam by right-wing hacks trying to use the “but your guy even admits this is OK” line. That’s the role these dumbasses play — elevating style over substance like it’s some exam hypothetical while they collect applause as the useful idiots willing to run interference for the assault on constitutional freedoms.
Remember when a Yale Law professor wrote about “Dear right-wing media consumers, I’m a liberal but I think Dobbs seems right“? It’s the same garbage. To a select cadre of law professors, getting a byline in a major publication is the coin of the realm and since constitutional order is abstract to them, they’ll say whatever anyone wants.
And then just hope that no one ever brings up the receipts.
Amy Coney Barrett Deserves to Be on the Supreme Court [Bloomberg]
Kavanaugh Is the Last Hope for Abortion Rights [Bloomberg]
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
