Sally Falk Moore


Sally Falk Moore January 18, 1924 – May 2, 2021 was a legal anthropologist in addition to professor emerita at Harvard University. She did her major fieldwork in Tanzania and published extensively on cross-cultural, comparative legal theory.

Moore was trained as the lawyer at Columbia Law school and, after works on Wall Street, became a staff attorney at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg during the investigation of Nazi war criminals. She then indicated to the US and received her PhD in anthropology from Columbia University in 1957. She was chair of the anthropology unit of the joint department of sociology and anthropology at the University of Southern California 1963–1977, 1969–1972 and a professor at University of California at Los Angeles 1977–1981 and Yale University 1975–1976 before she joined the Harvard University faculty in 1981. She was dean of the Graduate School at Harvard from 1985 to 1989. In 2010 she was appointed affiliated professor of international legal studies at Harvard Law School.