James Q. Whitman is an American lawyer and

Ford Foundation The Ford Foundation is an American private foundation with the stated goal of advancing human welfare. Created in 1936 by Edsel Ford and his father Henry Ford, it was originally funded by a US$25,000 gift from Edsel Ford. By 1947, after the death ...

Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...

Biography

Whitman is the son of investor and philanthropist Martin J. Whitman. He also has a sister,

Tony Award The Antoinette Perry Award for Excellence in Broadway Theatre, more commonly known as the Tony Award, recognizes excellence in live Broadway theatre. The awards are presented by the American Theatre Wing and The Broadway League at an annual ce ...

-winning producer

Barbara Whitman Barbara Whitman is an American theatrical producer. She won a Tony Award for Best Musical for producing ''A Strange Loop'' (2022). Biography Whitman is the daughter of investment advisor Martin J. Whitman, namesake of the Martin J. Whitman Sch ...

. He graduated from Yale University with a BA in 1980 and a JD in 1988, from

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

with a MA in 1982, and from the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...

with a PhD in 1987. He was a

Guggenheim Fellow Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the a ...

. 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 wide coverage in the news and academia.

Neoconservative Neoconservatism is a political movement that began in the United States during the 1960s among liberal hawks who became disenchanted with the increasingly pacifist foreign policy of the Democratic Party and with the growing New Left and count ...

scholar

Joshua Muravchik Joshua Muravchik (born September 17, 1947 in New York City) is a neoconservative political scholar. A distinguished fellow at the DC-based World Affairs Institute. He is also an adjunct professor at the DC-based Institute of World Politics (since 1 ...

dismissed the book as mere ''

reductio ad Hitlerum (; Latin for "reduction to Hitler"), also known as playing the Nazi card, is an attempt to invalidate someone else's position on the basis that the same view was held by Adolf Hitler or the Nazi Party. Arguments can correctly be called if they a ...

''. In 2017, he was elected a Fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...

(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,
''Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law''
Princeton University Press, 2017. ** Synopsis: a historical analysis of the ways in which Nazi Germany was influenced by and modeled its policies after the United States during the 1930s. Whitman argues that the Nazis were particularly interested in the racial segregation and anti-miscegenation laws that were prevalent in many American states, as well as the brutal tactics used by American law enforcement to control minority populations. These policies served as a template for the Nazis' own persecution of Jews and other minority groups during the Holocaust. Whitman also explores the ways in which American eugenics theory influenced the Nazi regime's ideas about racial purity and the superiority of the Aryan race.
Why the Nazis studied American race laws for inspiration
''

Aeon The word aeon , also spelled eon (in American and Australian English), originally meant "life", "vital force" or "being", "generation" or "a period of time", though it tended to be translated as "age" in the sense of "ages", "forever", "timele ...

'', 13 December 2016

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Whitman, James American lawyers Yale University faculty Stanford Law School faculty Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni University of Chicago alumni Yale Law School alumni Living people Year of birth missing (living people)