John Fabian Witt

John Fabian Witt is Allen H. Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law, Professor of History, and Head of Davenport College at Yale. He is the author of the Bancroft Prize-winning Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History (Free Press / Simon & Schuster 2012); American Contagions: Law and Democracy from Smallpox to COVID-19 (Yale University Press, 2020); To Save the Country: A Lost Manuscript of the Civil War Constitution (Yale University Press, 2019) (with Will Smiley); Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law (Harvard University Press, 2007); and The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law (Harvard University Press, 2004). Professor Witt’s casebooks, Torts and Regulation: Cases, Principles, and Institutions (2nd ed. 2020) and Torts: Cases, Principles, and Institutions (5th ed. 2020), are available for free on a Creative Commons license at https://www.cali.org. He is currently working on a big book about the men and women behind the Garland Fund, the radical 1920s foundation that quietly financed the efforts that culminated in Brown v. Board of Education. Stay tuned!