Ph.D. (History), University of California, Berkeley, 2000
A.B., Washington University in St. Louis, 1994
Courses Taught
Conservatism
Constitutional Law
International Human Rights
Supreme Court Alternatives
Samuel Moyn is the Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, where he also serves as head of Grace Hopper College.
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 Times1 (Yale University Press, 2023), based on the Carlyle Lectures2 in the History of Political Thought at the University of Oxford.
Currently he is working on (different) projects on aging and politics constitutionalism and democracy, and the Vietnam war.
Moyn is a fellow of the new Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft6. 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.
A new website created by several Yale Law students provides a way to learn about the history of the Supreme Court and includes detailed reform options.
Scholarship by Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence Samuel Moyn is mentioned in a New York Times opinion piece about the future of the Supreme Court.
Professor Moyn argues the goal of Supreme Court reform shouldn’t be to make the Court less ideological, but to make it less powerful. He discusses what inspired his interest on this topic and what types of reforms he thinks should be considered in this highly polarized moment.
Samuel Moyn is Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and a Professor of History at Yale University. Ryan D. Doerfler is Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School.