BUSH ADMINISTRATION NAMES NYU LAW PROFESSOR NOAH FELDMAN SENIOR ADVISOR FOR CONSTITUTIONAL LAW IN POST-WAR IRAQ

joan.dim@nyu.edu

New York (May 12, 2003) --The Bush administration has named Noah Feldman, a professor at the New York University School of Law, senior advisor for constitutional law in the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) for post-war Iraq.

Feldman, who joined the NYU Law School faculty in 2001, is co-director of NYU Law's Center on Law and Security. In addition, Feldman is a key player in the University's Center for Catastrophe Preparedness and Response (CCPR), where he spearheads a program that seeks to launch a national policy debate over such issues as the legal dimensions of anti-terrorism detention and punishment, U.S involvement in multilateral initiatives, and Islam and the transition to democracy. NYU was chosen by Congress last year to be the location for this Center, the only one so designated in New York.

He is a member of the coordinating committee of the Yale Middle East Legal Studies Seminar, which meets annually in the Middle East and brings together participants from all the major Arab countries, as well as Iran, Turkey, and Israel. He maintains a special practice litigating constitutional cases before the federal courts. A much sought-after speaker, he lectures internationally on law, religion, and the Middle East.

Feldman is also the author of After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, April 2003), in which he proposes that Islam and democracy are viable, and that the West --particularly the United States -- should work to bring it about.

Born in Boston in 1970, Feldman was a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard before joining NYU. Selected as a Rhodes Scholar upon graduation from Harvard University in 1992, he earned a D.Phil. in Islamic thought from Oxford University in 1994, then a J.D. from Yale University Law School in 1997. He served as a law clerk to Chief Judge Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and to Associate Justice David H. Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court. He is fluent in Hebrew, Arabic, and French, and has knowledge of Korean.

Feldman alternates his time between New York City and Washington, DC, where he lives with his wife, Jeannie Suk, author of Postcolonial Paradoxes (Oxford, 2002).

The Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance was created within the Department of Defense by a January 20 directive from President Bush. According to Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith, the office is working to establish relationships with the players who will be involved in a humanitarian and reconstruction effort -- U.N. agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and various expatriate Iraqi groups.

Feith said the group has developed an operational concept that would ease the delivery of aid, create a structure for U.S. forces to coordinate relief, and restart a distribution system for aid using U.S. supplies until the time that international aid arrives on the scene.

05/14/03