Samuel Moyn designated the Luce Professor of Jurisprudence

Samuel Moyn, recently named as the Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence, focuses his research on international law, human rights, the law of war, and legal thought, in both historical and current perspective.

Moyn also serves as a professor of history, researching a diverse range of subjects in intellectual history, especially 20th-century European moral and political theory.

Moyn has written several books in the fields of European intellectual history and human rights history, including “The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History,” and edited or co-edited a number of others. His most recent books are “Christian Human Rights” (based on the Mellon Distinguished Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania) and “Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World.” Moyn is currently working on a new book on the origins and significance of humane war. He has also written essays for numerous publications, including Boston Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dissent, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

The Yale professor assists with several book series: the Brandeis Library of Modern Jewish Thought, the Cambridge University Press “Human Rights in History” series, and the University of Pennsylvania Press “Intellectual History of the Modern Age” series. He co-founded and for a decade served as co-editor of the journal Humanity, and he was co-editor for seven years of Modern Intellectual History. He solicits book reviews on human rights for Lawfare and is on the editorial boards of Constellations, Global Intellectual History, the Historical Journal, and Humanity, among other journals.

Moyn received a doctorate in modern European history from the University of California-Berkeley and a law degree from Harvard University. He came to Yale from Harvard, where he was the Jeremiah Smith Jr. Professor of Law and professor of history. Prior to Harvard, he spent 13 years at Columbia University, where he was most recently the James Bryce Professor of European Legal History.

Moyn has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Berggruen Institute, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study and the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. His books have won the Morris Forkosch Prize of the Journal of the History of Ideas and the Sybil Halpern Milton Memorial Book Prize of the German Studies Association. At Columbia University, his teaching was recognized by the Mark van Doren Teaching Award.