About Noah
Noah Feldman is a Harvard law professor, ethical philosopher & advisor, public intellectual, religious scholar & historian, and prolific writer.
Described as “one of the country’s most sought-after authorities” and “a public intellectual for our time,” Feldman was selected as the 75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century by Esquire.
The New York Times calls Feldman “part of a vanishing breed, a public intellectual equally at ease with writing law review articles, books aimed at both popular and scholarly audiences and regular opinion columns.”
He is the author of 10 books, including Divided By God, What We Owe Iraq, Cool War, Scorpions, The Three Lives of James Madison, Arab Winter, and his latest, “The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery & The Refounding of America.”A policy & public affairs columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, Feldman also writes for The New York Review of Books and was a contributing writer for the New York Times for nearly a decade.
In 2018 Feldman founded Ethical Compass Advisors, which helps clients like Facebook, eBay & Tiktok, as well as startups ranging from synthetic biology to AI, improve ethical decision-making by creating and implementing new governance solutions. In this capacity, he conceived and architected the Facebook Oversight Board, and continues to advise the company on ethics and governance issues.
Feldman is host of the Deep Background podcast, an interview show that explores the historical, scientific, legal and cultural context behind the biggest stories in the news, with a focus on ethics & power. He has interviewed luminaries & thought leaders like the NYT’s Nikole Hannah-Jones, author Malcolm Gladwell and Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin.
At age 32, Feldman served as senior constitutional advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and subsequently advised members of the Iraqi Governing Council on the drafting of Iraq’s interim constitution.
Earning his A.B. summa cum laude from Harvard, Feldman finished first in his class. Selected as a Rhodes Scholar, he earned a D.Phil. from Oxford University, writing his dissertation on Aristotle’s Ethics. Feldman received his J.D. from Yale Law School, and clerked for Justice David Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court.
He splits his time between Cambridge, Massachusetts and the coast of Maine
