Lecture by Samuel Moyn of Yale Law School on how a Jewish family of international lawyers debated the Vietnam War and what it reveals about the laws of war and peace.
Samuel Moyn will be at Perry World House on Thursday, October 22, for a talk titled Does Intl. Law Bring Peace? How a Jewish Family Debated the Vietnam War. It's part of the Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Lecture Series, which has been running since 1996 to honor the philanthropists who supported a range of civic and Jewish causes. The event is cosponsored by Penn Carey Law School's Department of Political Science, the Jewish Studies Program, and the Legal History Consortium.
Moyn is the Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale, and he's written extensively on human rights and the law. You might know him from The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010), Christian Human Rights (2015), Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (2018), or his more recent Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (2021). This talk follows a group of Jewish international lawyers who set out to end the Vietnam War in the 1960s—among them the nephew of Hans Kelsen, one of the most famous legal philosophers of the twentieth century.
That's where the family part comes in. Moyn looks at what happened when Kelsen himself was asked to join the fray, and what those debates reveal about the relationship between the laws of war and peace and American Jewish identity. It's a specific, personal way into a much larger question about whether international law actually does what it's supposed to do.
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The talk runs from 5:15 PM to 6:45 PM at Perry World House, 3803 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104. It's free, and you can attend either in person or virtually.
