Noah Feldman

Noah Raam Feldman (born May 22, 1970) is an American legal scholar and academic who is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University. He is also the chairman of the Harvard Society of Fellows.

Feldman was formerly a contributing writer for The New York Times, and has been a public affairs columnist for Bloomberg Opinion for over a decade, covering the Supreme Court and other legal and business matters. Feldman's work is focused on AI innovation, ethics and constitutional law with an emphasis on innovation, free speech, law and religion, and history.

Feldman was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Orthodox Jewish parents. He studied Near Eastern languages and civilizations at Harvard University. In 1990, as a junior at Harvard College, he won a Harry S. Truman Scholarship. Feldman graduated first in his class in 1992 with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

Upon graduating from Harvard, Feldman was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Christ Church, Oxford. In 1994, he earned a Doctor of Philosophy (D.Phil.) from Oxford in Oriental studies, writing his dissertation on Aristotelian ethics and its Islamic reception. While at Oxford, he was a member of the Oxford University L'Chaim Society. Feldman then returned to the United States to attend Yale Law School, where he was the book review editor of the Yale Law Journal. He graduated with a Juris Doctor in 1997.

After graduating from law school, Feldman was a law clerk for Chief Judge Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1997 to 1998, then for Justice David Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1998 to 1999.

In 2001, Feldman joined the faculty of New York University Law School, where he became a tenured full professor in 2005 and was appointed Cecelia Goetz Professor of Law in 2006. In 2007, he joined the Harvard Law School faculty as the Bemis Professor of International Law, teaching classes on the First Amendment, the Constitution, and the international order. In 2014, he was appointed the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

In April 2024, Feldman was appointed co-chair (with Professor Alison Simmons) of Harvard's Institutional Voice Working Group by Interim President Alan Garber. The group's report, released May 28, 2024, recommended that Harvard refrain from making official statements on public matters that don't directly affect the university's core function. The recommendations were accepted by Harvard leadership and endorsed by the Harvard Corporation.

In October 2025, Feldman was appointed the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University, the highest distinction a faculty member can receive at the university. The title of University Professor was created in 1935 to honor individuals whose groundbreaking work crosses the boundaries of multiple disciplines, allowing them to pursue research at any of Harvard's Schools.