I am Martha Minow, and it is my great delight

to welcome you all as we honor Noah Feldman on his appointment

as the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law.

Applause is appropriate.

[APPLAUSE]

So Professor Feldman will acknowledge in person

some of the family and friends who are here.

I just want to say how thrilled I

am to see his parents, who I've known

a long time, his children, and other close friends.

And before I tell you some more about Noah's

extraordinary background and his career--

and also just hint at the fact that he did such a good job

when we had a prior chair lecture that I had to give him

another chair so we'd get another one--

I do want to take a moment to describe

the wonderful story behind the Felix Frankfurter Chair.

So Felix Frankfurter moved to New York City with his family

in 1894 and entered the public schools there.

He received his bachelor's degree

from the College of the City of New York in 1902,

and then he came to Harvard Law School.

And he was an editor of the Law Review,

and he was first in his class, graduating in 1906.

He practiced law briefly in New York.

Then he joined the US Attorney's Office as an assistant

to Henry L. Stimson.

President Taft appointed Stimson to be Secretary of War,

and Felix Frankfurter became the Legal Officer of the Bureau

of Insular Affairs.

Felix Frankfurter went on to argue cases before the United

States Supreme Court.

And he remained at the War Department

after Wilson became president.

And then he accepted an invitation in 1914

to join the Harvard Law faculty as a full professor,

becoming the first Jewish professor

at the Harvard Law School, where he taught for 25 years.

He then was nominated to the United States Supreme Court

in 1939, where he spent 23 years.

During his lifetime, he was a leading civil libertarian.

He was a defender of Sacco and Vanzetti.

He was, I think, widely understood

as one of the first public intellectuals.

You see there's a kind of match here between the chair

and the person.

On the occasion of his 80th birthday,

his sister Estelle launched a fund

that she hoped would support a professorship

in constitutional law to be named in his honor.

And ultimately, that's what happened.

And it enabled, with the contributions

from other people, the launch of this chair in 1983.

And previous holders of the Frankfurter Chair

include professors Abraham Chayes,

Professor Alan Dershowitz, and Professor Cass Sunstein.

After he passed away in 1965, after Frankfurter passed away,

Dean Erwin Griswold described him,

and I quote, as "a man of great vitality, physical and mental.

He was always on the move.

He was always stirring up [? novel ?] ideas.

He was a great stimulator of students.

He told them to do things and then saw to it

that they did them, and was generous in sharing credit

with them."

Do you see why this is such a perfect match?

Griswold's description of Frankfurter

applies to Noah Feldman.

Noah is a man of great vitality.

He stirs up new ideas, and he encourages students.

The breadth of his scholarship is nothing short of astounding.

It stretches from American constitutional law,

the relationship between law and religion,

constitutional design, the history of legal theory.

And Noah is also a distinguished scholar of Islamic studies

and Islamic law.

He served as Senior Constitutional Adviser

to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq

and subsequently advised members of the Iraqi Governing Council

on the drafting of the transitional administrative

law, or its interim constitution.

Noah is a rare kind of scholar who

can influence law and policy on the international stage

while also writing for a popular audience.

He's a prolific columnist for Bloomberg,

and his syndicated columns on law

explain the workings of the United States Supreme Court

in international law to everyone while also

speaking to experts in those fields,

often with a critical eye.

His seven books bridge the gap between theory and practice

and between experts and generalists as well.

His 2010 book, Scorpions, explores

the history and legacies of the United States Supreme Court

justices appointed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt,

with insights for scholars of the court,

including members of the court who

have told me it's the best book they

read in years about the court.

One of the scorpions Noah explores in that book

is a man named Felix Frankfurter.

Noah showed extraordinary promise

in his early academic career.

He attended high school not far from here

at Maimonides in Brookline.

In his senior year, he did something

that few American high school students have ever done.

He won the US Chidon Competition in Hebrew,

which is like, I don't know, the Olympics on the Torah,

on the Bible.

An amazing kind of thing.

But then he said, I'm going to compete

in the International Bible Contest, the Chidon Ha-Tanach.

And sometimes it's called Jeopardy for Jews.

And it's, of course, assumed that the person who wins

will be an Israeli, every year.

But in 1988, Noah Feldman and his co-American

Jeremy Wieder, who's now Rabbinic Dean at Yeshiva

University, defied the odds, and they

put the Americans on the map.

And Weider won the competition that year.

And Noah, not too shabby, came in fourth.

In a newspaper interview earlier this year,

Noah described that experience, and I quote him,

as "one of the most important educational experiences

of his life, that opened new worlds."

Harvard Law School reaps the benefit of that high school

year of study.

And each year, Noah teaches classes

on Jewish law and legal theory.

After high school, Noah came to Harvard College, where

he earned-- I have to say this-- the highest GPA,

I think, in the history-- anyway, certainly in his class.

He graduated summa cum laude with a degree

in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.

He was selected as a Rhodes scholar.

He earned a DPhil in Oriental Studies from Oxford University.

And then he attended Yale Law School.

That happens to some people.

And he served as book reviews editor of the Law Journal.

He also was a law clerk then for First Chief Judge Harry

Edwards on the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit,

and then for Justice David Souter of the United States

Supreme Court.

He began his teaching career at NYU,

following his appointment as a junior fellow at the Harvard

Society of Fellows.

And I'm thrilled to see people from the Society of Fellows

here today.

He was offered a visiting professorship at Harvard,

and he then came as a permanent member of our faculty.

And he's also now a senior fellow at the Society

of Fellows at Harvard.

His many books cover so many subjects,

and I won't be able to describe them all, because I want

to give him some time to speak.

But it is noteworthy that his work

covers a range from Islamic legal studies;

the constitutional work in transitional societies;

and works on religion and government; Scorpions, which

I've already described, which won the award from Scribes,

the American Society of Legal Writers;

and received the Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar

Association.

In 2013 he published Cool War-- The Future

of Global Competition, which examines

the relationship between the United States and China,

and the evolving power struggles.

And last year he co-edited, along

with Kathleen Sullivan, the case book Constitutional

Law, 18th Edition, the book that was

launched initially by the distinguished professor Gerry

Gunther.

Bloomberg magazine once described Noah Feldman