John Witt

John Fabian Witt is the Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law and a Professor of History at Yale, where he teaches and writes on the history of American law and the law of torts. He is the author of books including The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America (forthcoming in October 2025) and Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History, which won the Bancroft Prize, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was awarded the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award, and was a New York Times Notable Book.

Witt is a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and former Head of College at Yale’s Davenport College. He teaches annually in the Warrior-Scholar Project Academic Boot Camp for enlisted veterans and has launched a course on the history of the U.S. Constitution for secondary school teachers and other educators through the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History. 

Other writings include American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to COVID-19 (Yale University Press, 2020), To Save the Country: A Lost Manuscript of the Civil War Constitution (Yale University Press, 2019) (with Will Smiley), Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law (Harvard University Press, 2007), and The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law (Harvard University Press, 2004), as well as articles in the American Historical Review, the Columbia Law Review, the Harvard Law Review, The Yale Law Journal, and other scholarly journals. He has written for The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.

Witt holds B.A., J.D., and Ph.D. degrees from Yale and served as a law clerk to Judge Pierre N. Leval on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He has taught at Columbia Law School, Harvard Law School, and the University of Texas at Austin.

Witt’s casebooks, Torts and Regulation: Cases, Principles, and Institutions (3d ed., 2022) and Torts: Cases, Principles, and Institutions (6th ed. 2022) (with Karen Tani), are publicly available on a Creative Commons license. When not updating the casebooks, he spends time tending an orchard in the Connecticut countryside, fishing in Long Island Sound, and watching baseball.