Samuel Moyn

Samuel Moyn is the Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, where he also serves as head of Grace Hopper College.

His forthcoming book is Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Hoard Power and Wealth — and What to Do About It, scheduled to appear from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in June 2026.

Trained in modern European intellectual history, he works on political and legal thought in modern times and on constitutional and international law in historical and current perspective. His most recent book is Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press, 2023), based on the Carlyle Lectures in the History of Political Thought at the University of Oxford.

He spent a decade writing some books about the history of international law and human rights, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard University Press, 2010); Christian Human Rights (Penn Press, 2015), based on Mellon Distinguished Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania in fall 2014; Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Harvard, 2018); and Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021), which came out in a paperback edition in 2022 with Picador in the United States and Verso in the United Kingdom.

Currently he is working on (different) projects constitutionalism and democracy, legal theory, and the Vietnam war.

Moyn is a fellow of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Over the years he has written in venues such as the Atlantic, Boston Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education,Commonweal, Dissent, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic,the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.