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John Witt
Allen H. Duffy Class of 1960 Professor, Law School; Professor of History
john.witt@yale.edu
127 Wall St
American legal history
John Fabian Witt is Allen H. Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law at Yale Law School. His most recent book Lincoln's Code: The Laws of War in American History (2012) was awarded the Bancroft Prize, and was selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, as a New York Times Notable Book for 2012, and as the winner of the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award. Previous writing includes Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law (Harvard University Press, 2007), and the prize winning book, The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law (Harvard University Press, 2004), as well as articles in the American Historical Review, the Columbia Law Review, the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, and other scholarly journals. He has written for the New York Times, Slate, and the Washington Post. In 2010 he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Professor Witt is a graduate of Yale Law School and Yale College and he holds a Ph.D. in history from Yale. Before returning to Yale, he was the George Welwood Murray Professor of Legal History at Columbia University. He served as law clerk to Judge Pierre N. Leval on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Ph.D., Yale, 2000
J.D., Yale, 1999
B.A., Yale, 1994
History of American Law
The Law of War