James Madison and the Bank of the United States and Dolley Madison during the War of 1812 with Noah Feldman

Country Over Self

In this episode, Matt and Noah talk about the 4th President, James Madison, and how he set aside his long-held and fiercely-argued belief in the unconstitutionality of the Bank of the United States and extended the bank's charter because...it worked and had been accepted by others as de facto constitutional. Matt and Noah also talk about the story of Dolley Madison, the most famous of the early First Ladies, and how she did (or didn't!) save the famous Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington from being burned in the White House when the British invaded Washington D.C. during the War of 1812. Noah Feldman Noah Feldman is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law and Director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law at Harvard Law School. He is the Chair of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University and a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also the co-chair of Harvard University’s Institutional Voice Working Group. He is a contributing writer for the Bloomberg View. He served as senior constitutional advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and advised members of the Iraqi Governing Council on the drafting of the Transitional Administrative Law or interim constitution. He served as a law clerk to Justice David H. Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court (1998 – 1999). He received his A.B. summa cum laude in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University in 1992, finishing first in his class. Selected as a Rhodes Scholar, he earned a D. Phil. in Islamic Thought from Oxford University and a J.D. from Yale Law School, serving as Book Reviews Editor of the Yale Law Journal.

He is the author of ten books: Arab Winter (Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2020); The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President (Random House, 2017); Cool War: The Future of Global Competition (Random House, 2013); Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices (Twelve Publishing, 2010); The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State (Princeton University Press, 2008); Divided By God: America's Church-State Problem and What We Should Do About It (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005); What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation building (Princeton University Press, 2004); and After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003). He’s also the co-author of two textbooks: Constitutional Law, 21st Edition (Foundation Press, 2022) and First Amendment Law, 8th Edition (Foundation Press, 2022). His newest book, To Be A Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel and the Jewish People was released on March 5th, 2024 (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2024).

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