Middle-east Arab News Opinion | Asharq Al-awsat

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Members of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) raise the victory gesture as they stand on a building in the town of al-Karamah, 26 kms from the ISIS group bastion of Raqqa, on May 10, 2017. DELIL SOULEIMAN/AFP/Getty Images

Syria’s Kurds Work All the Angles for Autonomy

by Noah Feldman | May 30, 2017 | Opinion

It’s an idea that Syria, Russia and the US all might be willing to tolerate. Turkey however … Outside the headlines, something remarkable is going on in Syria. The Kurds, making a long-term play for an autonomous region, seem to have decided that their...

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Makes a great accessory, too. Credit: Sarah Rice/Getty Image

Trump’s Right, the Constitution Is ‘Archaic’

by Noah Feldman | May 3, 2017 | Opinion

Is the Constitution archaic, as President Donald Trump implied recently in an interview with Fox News? The answer is a resounding yes — if you’re an originalist, as Trump claims to be. The president unwittingly hit on the best possible justification for a living...

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Three of the national monuments now under review by the Department of the Interior: (from left to right) Gold Butte in Nevada, the Pacific Remote Islands and Giant Sequoia in Northern California.
Bureau of Land Management/Flickr; U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service/Flickr; David McNew/Getty Images

National Monuments Are Safe From Presidential Whims

by Noah Feldman | May 1, 2017 | Opinion

The next fight over the legality of President Donald Trump’s executive orders will be about the designation of national monuments. Trump’s order to review all major monument declarations in the last 20 years sets the stage for reversal of some or all of President...

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You can call me Sleepy.
Photographer: Christopher Furlong

Naming a Baby is Hard Enough without the State Involved

by Noah Feldman | Apr 3, 2017 | Opinion

The state of Georgia is refusing to allow a couple to give their baby the last name Allah — not because it’s sacrilegious but because the state requires a baby’s last name to be the same as one of its parents’ or a combination of the two. That’s arguably...

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WOJTEK RADWANSKI/AFP/Getty Images

The Politics of a Constitutional Crisis

by Noah Feldman | Dec 28, 2016 | Opinion

Many constitutional systems around the globe have been tested in 2016. Turkey, Poland, the UK, the U.S. — each case sheds some light on how different constitutional arrangements respond to the challenges of political factions. Begin with the worst constitutional...