James Q. Whitman

James Q. Whitman is Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale University.  He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, where his dissertation was directed by Arnaldo Momigliano, as well as baccalaureate and law degrees from Yale.   Before beginning his teaching career, he was a judicial clerk on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.  Whitman has taught a variety of legal subjects, including criminal law, bankruptcy, contracts, art law, comparative law and legal history.  He is the author of six books and more than fifty articles, including From Masters to Slaves to Lords of Lands (2025), Hitler’s America Model (2017), The Verdict of Battle (2012), The Origins of Reasonable Doubt (2008), Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide between America and Europe (2003), and “The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity versus Liberty” (Yale Law Journal, 2004).  He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Honorary Fellow of the American Society for Legal History, a titular member of the Académie Internationale de Droit Comparé, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship among other honors.