Samuel Moyn

Samuel Moyn's picture
Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History
Office: 
SLB 352
Fields of interest: 

International law, human rights, the law of war, and legal thought, 20th-century European moral and political theory

Bio: 

Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University.

He received a doctorate in modern European history from the University of California-Berkeley in 2000 and a law degree from Harvard University in 2001. He came to Yale from Harvard University, where he was Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law and Professor of History. Before this, he spent thirteen years in the Columbia University history department, where he was most recently James Bryce Professor of European Legal History.

His areas of interest in legal scholarship include international law, human rights, the law of war, and legal thought, in both historical and current perspective. In intellectual history, he has worked on a diverse range of subjects, especially twentieth-century European moral and political theory.

He has written several books in his fields of European intellectual history and human rights history, including The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010), and edited or coedited a number of others. His most recent books are Christian Human Rights (2015, based on Mellon Distinguished Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania in fall 2014) and Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (2018). His newest book, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, appeared with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in fall 2021.  Over the years he has written in venues such as Boston Review, the Chronicle of HigherEducation, Dissent, The NationThe New Republic, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

Period: 
Modern
Recent
Geography: 
Global/International
US
Western Europe
Thematic: 
Historiography
Intellectual
Jewish
Legal
Political
Religious
War & Society