Linda Kinstler

Linda Kinstler is a nonfiction writer and scholar of law and intellectual history. Her first book, Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends, chronicles the pursuit of justice for Holocaust survivors in the former Soviet Union and explores the fraught relation between legal and historical judgment. The book won a 2023 Whiting Award in Nonfiction and was shortlisted for the Wingate Prize for Jewish literature. A contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, her journalism and essays cover the ideas shaping contemporary life and politics, focusing on law, technology, and philosophy.

Her current book project, Acts of Oblivion: A History of Forgetting (under contract with Liveright), uncovers the lost history of legal oblivion in order to understand how the distinct moral burden it placed upon its practitioners—to understand but not absolve, to forget but not forgive, to punish but not avenge—shaped the past and might yet be brought to bear upon the present. For centuries, oblivion was circulated, translated, and proclaimed as part of the ordinary business of statecraft. “Acts,” “laws,” and “articles” of oblivion were declared in times when there was a surfeit of memory; when crimes had been committed that were so grave that no legal system could sufficiently avenge them. The book traces how the idea of oblivion continues to inform contemporary questions of transitional justice, privacy laws, and memory politics around the globe. An essay based on the book was anthologized in The Best American Essays 2025.

This bio reflects the fellow’s work and affiliations as of their fellowship year.

• The Bitter Fight Over the Meaning of “Genocide”: A New York Times Magazine essay examining the contested history and evolving meaning of the term “genocide” and how debates over its use shape responses to mass violence around the world.
• Jan. 6, America’s Rupture, and the Strange, Forgotten Power of Oblivion: A guest essay for The New York Times exploring how societies remember moments of political trauma and what the struggle over collective memory reveals about accountability and reconciliation. 
• The Olive Branch of Oblivion: An essay for Liberties examining the history of legal oblivion and the tensions between remembrance, forgiveness, and accountability in societies reckoning with past violence.