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Samuel Moyn

Samuel Moyn is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and a professor of history at Yale University. His books include The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010), Christian Human Rights (2015), and Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (2018), and he has written for the Boston Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dissent, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. (May 2020)

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Litigating the War on Terror: An Exchange

The head of Human Rights Watch rejects criticism that efforts to mitigate America’s worst excesses after September 11, 2001 helped sanitize US belligerence.

September 8, 2021

Michael Ratner’s Tragedy, and Ours

The career of the veteran constitutional rights litigator offers a case history of how US humanitarians ended up sanitizing the war on terror instead of opposing it.

September 1, 2021

How Trump Won

He failed as an autocrat, despite opponents’ overblown fears, but succeeded in breaking the neoliberal consensus of the Beltway. We ignore that at our peril.

November 9, 2020

Gustave Courbet: Apple, Pear, and Orange, circa 1871–1872

The Trouble with Comparisons

Analogy and disanalogy with the past can assist in analyzing our present, but not if they allow indulging in a melodramatic righteousness, and luxuriating in our fears, all while preparing a terrifyingly normal future.

May 19, 2020

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