Noah Feldman, Columnist

Rule of Law 1, Trump's Immigration Ban 0

If there's anything the legal system won't stand for, it's executive overreach.

January 29, 2017 at 10:10 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Don't get too excited, Mr. President.
Photographer: Olivier Douliery/Bloomberg

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It’s beginning. The legal system’s constitutional defense against President Donald Trump’s policies won its first battle this weekend when several federal district courts blocked the implementation of his executive order banning immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries.

The lawyers’ resistance won’t always succeed, and it will face many bumps in the road over the next four years. The resistance got a big assist this time from Trump himself, who ignored the Department of Justice and its first-rate lawyers. Eventually, Trump may figure out how to use the legal system to achieve his goals instead of work against it.