James Whitman

James Whitman
Occupation	Professor, writer
Awards	Guggenheim Fellow
Academic background
Education	Yale University (BA, JD) Columbia University (MA) University of Chicago (PhD)
Thesis title	Rule of Roman Law in Romantic Germany, 1790–1860
Thesis year	1987
Doctoral advisor	Arnaldo Momigliano
Academic work
Discipline	Law
Sub discipline	Comparative Law, Comparative Legal History
Institutions	Stanford University, Yale University
Main interests	Legal history

James Q. Whitman is an American lawyer and Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale University.

Biography

Whitman is the son of investor and philanthropist Martin J. Whitman. He also has a sister, Tony Award-winning producer Barbara Whitman.

He graduated from Yale University with a BA in 1980 and a JD in 1988, from Columbia University with a MA in 1982, and from the University of Chicago with a PhD in 1987. He was a Guggenheim Fellow. In 2015, he was awarded a doctorate honoris causa by the KU Leuven (Catholic University of Leuven)

Whitman's 2017 book, Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, received critical acclaim. Neoconservative scholar Joshua Muravchik dismissed the book as mere reductio ad Hitlerum.

In 2017, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AASS).

Works

• "The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity versus Liberty", Yale Law Journal, Vol. 113, April 2004
• The Legacy of Roman Law in the German Romantic Era: Historical Vision and Legal Change, Princeton University Press, 1990, ISBN 978-0-691-05560-2
• Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. Princeton University Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0691172422
• Why the Nazis studied American race laws for inspiration. Aeon, 13 December 2016