Samuel Moyn to Join Faculty in July 2017

Dean Robert C. Post ’77 has announced the appointment of Samuel Moyn to the Yale Law School faculty. He will join as a professor of law, effective July 1, 2017.

Moyn’s 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 20th-century European moral and political theory. He was previously Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law and Professor of History at Harvard. He began his teaching career at Columbia University, where he taught for 13 years in the history department, ending as Bryce Professor of European Legal History.

"Professor Moyn's profound grasp of the history and significance of human rights will add immeasurably to the Law School," said Dean Post. "The remarkable breadth and range of Moyn's scholarship will create perfect synergies for our students and faculty."

Moyn 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 has written several books in his fields of European intellectual history and human rights history, including The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard University Press, 2010). More recently, he gave Mellon Distinguished Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania in 2014 that appeared as Christian Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). He is a co-editor of the journal Humanity, and is currently finishing a book for Harvard University Press on the relationship between human rights and distributive justice in modern times.