07 February 2018 - Human Rights in the Neoliberal Maelstrom

This lecture examines the relationship of human rights law and movements to their global economic context between the successive eras of national welfare states and of neoliberal globalization.

Samuel Moyn is Professor of Law and Professor of History at Yale University.

He 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 went to Yale from Harvard University, where he was Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law and Professor of History. Before this, he spent thirteen years in the Columbia University history department, where he was most recently James Bryce Professor of European Legal History.

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), and edited or coedited a number of others. His most recent book, based on Mellon Distinguished Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania in fall 2014, is Christian Human Rights (2015). A final book of human rights history, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press in April 2018.

His 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 twentieth-century European moral and political theory.

He is a coeditor of the journal Humanity. He helps 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. For seven years, he served as coeditor of Modern Intellectual History. He serves on the editorial boards of Constellations, Global Intellectual History, the Historical Journal, the Journal of the History of International Law, and Modern Judaism.

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEMoyn

This event is co-hosted by the Internationalism, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Solidarity (ICPS) Research Group, LSE Human Rights and the Department of Law.

ICPS aims to explore the politics of transnational solidarity by addressing the complications that arise in attempts to define, critique, and practice various strands of internationalism and cosmopolitanism.