In Memoriam: Sally Falk Moore, 1924-2021

Sally Falk Moore, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Anthropology Emerita at Harvard University, died this past spring in Cambridge. She was 97 years old.

Professor Moore was raised in New York City, where she attended Barnard College and was trained as a lawyer at Columbia Law School. After a brief stint working at a Wall Street law firm in 1945, she became a staff attorney at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg during the investigation of Nazi war criminals in 1946. That experience influenced her to venture into anthropology to study legal and political systems and how to attribute individual responsibility for the actions of a society.

In 1957, Dr. Moore received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University. She did major fieldwork in what is now Tanzania, studying the interactions between Indigenous, colonial, and post-colonial social and legal systems.

Before joining the Harvard faculty in 1981, Dr. Moore taught at the University of Southern California, the University of California at Los Angeles, and Yale University. At Harvard, she was dean of the Graduate School from 1985 to 1989.