Rate My Professor Samuel Moyn

Samuel Moyn is the Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, with appointments in both the Department of History and Yale Law School. He serves as Head of Grace Hopper College, a position he assumed in 2024. Moyn joined Yale in 2017 after prior faculty positions at Harvard University and Columbia University, where he was awarded the Mark van Doren Prize for undergraduate teaching. His academic background includes a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley in 2000, a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2001, and an A.B. from Washington University in St. Louis in 1994. Trained in modern European intellectual history, Moyn's research interests focus on political and legal thought in modern times; constitutional and international law in historical and current perspectives; constitutionalism and democracy; legal theory; the history of international law and human rights; and the Vietnam War. He is a Fellow of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Moyn is the author of several major books, including The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard University Press, 2010), Christian Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015; based on the Mellon Distinguished Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania), Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Harvard University Press, 2018), Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021; paperback editions Picador 2022 in the United States and Verso 2022 in the United Kingdom), 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), and the forthcoming Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Hoard Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026). He teaches courses such as “The World circa 2000” in the History Department and “The Crisis of Liberalism,” and has published articles in The New York Times, The Atlantic, the London Review of Books, and other outlets.