Noah Feldman - Education and Career

Education and Career

Feldman grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, where he attended the Maimonides School.

He graduated from Harvard College in 1992, ranked first in the College, and earned a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, where he earned a D.Phil in Islamic Thought in 1994. Upon his return from Oxford, he received his J.D., in 1997, from Yale Law School, where he was the book review editor of the Yale Law Journal. He later served as a law clerk for Associate Justice David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2001, he joined the faculty of New York University Law School (NYU), leaving for Harvard in 2007. In 2008, he was appointed the Bemis Professor of International Law.

He worked as an advisor in the early days of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq following the 2003 invasion of the country. While his initial work, under Jay Garner, was unfocused, he was authorized, under Paul Bremer's transitional team to help formulate the country's new constitution. However, what role if any he played in formulating the country's new constitution has not been established. It is not clear that he played any significant part in this constitutional work because his advisory role ended shortly after it began; whether he quit or was fired has never been made clear. He is a senior adjunct fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and regularly contributes features and opinion pieces to The New York Times Magazine and Bloomberg View columns.

A polyglot, he is fluent in Hebrew, Arabic, and French, in addition to English.