An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The best way to understand why a federal district court was wrong Wednesday, when it held that Twitter users have a constitutional right not to be blocked by President Donald Trump’s personal account, is to consider the lawsuits that will come next. I can point to a variety of reasons the decision was wrong, some of which I’ve already explored in an earlier column. It should be overturned on appeal. But chief among the problems is that the government doesn’t ultimately control what the court called the “interactive space” of replies to the president’s tweets — Twitter Inc. does.

If you wanted to measure just how different the Supreme Court is with the addition of Neil Gorsuch instead of Merrick Garland — who should be sitting in Justice Gorsuch’s seat but for the outrageous machinations of Senate Republicans — read the court’s Monday ruling in Epic Systems v. Lewis…Justice Gorsuch appears to imagine workers and employers negotiating under Marquess of Queensberry rules, engaged in a fair and equal face-off over working conditions and terms of employment. It’s a neat little story, and, “If you lived on the moon, with no knowledge of the realities of labor relations or the politics of class actions, you’d think it was obviously correct,” as Harvard law professor Noah Feldman wrote.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It’s hard to think of a contemporary writer who inspires more intense disagreement than Philip Roth, who died Tuesday at 85. From the surface, the debate seems to be about feminism: Observers have long noted that Roth’s female characters are less than fully realized, while his male characters often express misogynistic attitudes. But the disagreement, I think, goes deeper — to the question of what social function literature should fulfill. To Roth’s admirers, the point of literature is to expose depths of human experience that would otherwise be hidden or repressed. Roth certainly excelled in reporting on the vicissitude of desire, especially the male and the Jewish one. This is, after all, the man who famously described “the perfect couple: she puts the id back in Yid; I put the oy back in goy.”

President Trump’s decision to block his Twitter followers for their political views is a violation of the First Amendment, a federal judge ruled Wednesday, saying that Trump’s effort to silence his critics is not permissible because the digital space in which he engages with constituents is a public forum…Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor, said he thinks the case was wrongly decided and expects it to be reversed. For a public forum to exist, the government has to own or control it, he said, but in this case, Twitter also controls Trump’s account.