Samuel Moyn

An op-ed by Samuel Moyn. Since the 1970s, "global justice" has surged as a central topic in Anglophone political theory and philosophy. Why? A typical account, for instance from Martha Nussbaum, credits contemporary philosophers with transcending "the frontiers of justice," courageously leaving behind arbitrary limits normally imposed on distributive justice beyond borders. This option - there are now competing positions in the field - frequently labels itself cosmopolitan. The idea is that it took up a philosophical legacy going back to the Greek and Roman Stoics, who first called for "citizenship of the world," before Enlightenment thinkers such as Immanuel Kant revived their visionary program. I think much work in global justice is genuinely inspiring, but I want to offer two qualifications.

Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow has announced the creation of a committee to research if the school should continue to use its current shield. The shield is the coat of arms of the family of Isaac Royall, whose bequest endowed the first professorship of law at Harvard.

On the heels of an incident of racially-charged vandalism on campus, Harvard Law School Dean Martha L. Minow has appointed a committee to reconsider the school’s controversial seal—the crest of the former slaveholding Royall family that endowed Harvard’s first law professorship in the 19th century...Law professor Bruce H. Mann will serve as the chair of the committee, according to Minow’s email. Mann will be joined by Law professors Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Annette Gordon-Reed, Janet E. Halley, and Samuel Moyn...Two students and an alumnus will also serve on the committee.

A book review by Samuel Moyn...That such a life—a uniquely fortunate one in the annals of history—is essentially unearned in a world of horrors is a truth that our culture keeps at bay most of the time. But disquiet about it erupts all the same, in some people more than others. What if you were so often troubled by the incongruity between your sense of material comfort and the destitution of others, or unable to find routine defenses against it, that you felt you had to change your life entirely? “It was never a new idea that people are selfish,” Larissa MacFarquhar observes in one of the lapidary aphorisms scattered throughout Strangers Drowning, her masterpiece of a book about those among us who decide to drop everything and become extreme altruists.

“Choosing Not to Choose: Understanding the Value of Choice,” by Professor Cass R. Sunstein ’78 (Oxford). Choice, while a symbol of freedom, can also be a burden: If we had to choose all the time, asserts the author, we’d be overwhelmed. Indeed, Sunstein argues that in many instances, not choosing could benefit us—for example, if mortgages could be automatically refinanced when interest rates drop significantly.

An op-ed by Samuel Moyn. Pope Francis has been called a great champion for the downtrodden. Yet unlike many progressives throughout the West who admire him, he rarely expresses his concerns about the plight of the poor in terms of human rights. This silence is significant. In the 1930s and ’40s, Popes Pius XI and XII proclaimed human rights as humanity’s highest values. Their defense decisively influenced the authors of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. During his own storied visit to America in 1979, the newly elected Pope John Paul II insisted on the importance of human rights, especially freedom, and was lionized for facing down the communist empire of his Eastern European homeland. No one interested in how human rights became the idea of our time can ignore how Christians learned to champion them. But they changed their meaning in the process. This is changing under Francis, and that might be a good thing.

An article by Samuel Moyn. Imagine that one man owned everything. Call him Croesus, after the king of ancient lore who, Herodotus says, was so "wonderfully rich" that he "thought himself the happiest of mortals." Impossibly elevated above his fellow men and women, this modern Croesus is also magnanimous. He does not want people to starve, and not only because he needs some of them for the upkeep of his global estate. Croesus insists on a floor of protection, so that everyone living under his benevolent but total ascendancy can escape destitution. Health, food, water, even paid vacations, Croesus funds them all. In comparison with the world in which we live today, where few enjoy these benefits, Croesus offers a kind of utopia. It is the one foreseen in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), a utopia that, though little known in its own time, has become our own, with the rise in the past half-century of the international human rights movement — especially now that this movement has belatedly turned its attention to the economic and social rights that the declaration promised.

One hundred years ago, in the first two months of 1915, what was then called the Great War — puzzled over by experts gathered at a Harvard conference on Friday ― established its most enduring historical signatures...Moderated by Dean Martha Minow of the Law School, the title of the first panel, “The Transnational Theater of War,” was a reminder, Minow said, of the unprecedented global nature of the conflict. ..In the same panel, Samuel Moyn, a Harvard professor of law and history, was to talk about “Aggression and Atrocity: From the Great War to the Forever War.”

A host of new faculty members arrived at Harvard Law School this academic year, and over the summer, Dean Martha Minow announced two new faculty who will join HLS in 2015.

An op-ed by Samuel Moyn. The guns of August 1914 unleashed a debate that is still with us: Can the laws of war actually impose limits on how war is carried out? Germany invaded Belgium, violating that nation's neutrality -- which was guaranteed by treaties stretching back to the 19th century. This act horrified the world -- as would the civilian occupation policies that marked German rule in Belgium, Northern France, and elsewhere during the long years of trench warfare. The question of how much international law should be respected during wartime has resurfaced repeatedly through the 20th century -- in America, it has come up frequently since 9/11, especially surrounding the "torture debate."