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Samuel Moyn, Henry R Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and Professor of History at Yale University, will give a lecture at the School in honour of Professor Henry Shue. He will survey Leo Tolstoy’s still-relevant criticism of attempts to make war more humane through international law. Tolstoy's criticism remained constant despite shifting reasons and the almost total change in his career, and he argued for the pursuit of alternatives to 'more humane' war. The lecture will conclude by assessing the relevance of Tolstoy’s attack on humane war to the 'forever wars' of today.

This event is co-hosted with the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict.

About the speaker

Samuel Moyn is Henry R Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and Professor of History at Yale University. He has written several books in the fields of European intellectual history and human rights history, including The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010), and edited or coedited a number of others. His most recent books are Christian Human Rights (2015), based on Mellon Distinguished Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania in autumn 2014, and Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (2018). Currently he is working on a new book on the origins of humane war for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Over the years he has written for publications such as Boston Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dissent, The Nation, The New Republic, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.