Richard H. Helmholz (born 1940) is the Ruth Wyatt Rosenson Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. He received his LL.B. from Harvard Law School in 1965 and also earned an A.B. in French literature at Princeton University, and a Ph.D. in medieval history from the University of California at Berkeley.
He is a member of the Selden Society Council [1] and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. Before moving to the University of Chicago, he spent ten years at Washington University in St. Louis, where he was a professor of law and history. He is best known for his work on the influence of canon law on the common law.
His scholarship was cited by Justice David Souter's majority opinion in the 2004 Supreme Court case Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain et al., 542 U.S. 692. [2]
He teaches property, European legal history, and the law of oil and gas. In 2000–01, Helmholz was the Arthur Goodhart Visiting Professor of Legal Science at the University of Cambridge and in Fall 2005, he was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School.
John Selden was an English jurist, a scholar of England's ancient laws and constitution and scholar of Jewish law. He was known as a polymath; John Milton hailed Selden in 1644 as "the chief of learned men reputed in this land".
Jus commune or ius commune is Latin for "common law" in certain jurisdictions. It is often used by civil law jurists to refer to those aspects of the civil law system's invariant legal principles, sometimes called "the law of the land" in English law. While the ius commune was a secure point of reference in continental European legal systems, in England it was not a point of reference at all. The phrase "the common law of the civil law systems" means those underlying laws that create a distinct legal system and are common to all its elements.
Frederic William Maitland was an English historian and jurist who is regarded as the modern father of English legal history. From 1884 until his death in 1906, he was reader in English law, then Downing Professor of the Laws of England at the University of Cambridge.
Sir Paul Gavrilovitch Vinogradoff was a Russian and British historian and medievalist.
The Selden Society is a learned society and registered charity concerned with the study of English legal history. It functions primarily as a text publication society, but also undertakes other activities to promote scholarship within its sphere of interest. It is the only learned society wholly devoted to the topic of English legal history.
Paul Finkelman is an American legal historian. He is the author or editor of more than 50 books on American legal and constitutional history, slavery, general American history and baseball. In addition, he has authored more than 200 scholarly articles on these and many other subjects. From 2017 - 2022, Finkelman served as the President and Chancellor of Gratz College, Melrose Park, Pennsylvania.
Cornelius Adrian Comstock Vermeule is an American legal scholar who is currently the Ralph S. Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School. He is an expert on constitutional and administrative law, and, since 2016, has voiced support for Catholic integralism. He has articulated this into his theory of common-good constitutionalism.
Sir John Hamilton Baker, KC (Hon), LLD, FBA, FRHistS is an English legal historian. He was Downing Professor of the Laws of England at the University of Cambridge from 1998 to 2011.
Helen Maud Cam, was an English historian of the Middle Ages, and the first woman to be appointed a tenured professor at Harvard University.
Wilfrid Prest, AM is a historian, specialising in legal history, who is professor emeritus at the University of Adelaide. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and Queen's College, University of Melbourne, and a member of the Council of the Selden Society, London.
Charles Howard McIlwain was an American historian and political scientist. He won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1924. He was educated at Princeton University and Harvard University and taught at both institutions, as well as the University of Oxford, Miami University, and Bowdoin College. Though he trained as a lawyer, his career was mostly academic, devoted to constitutional history. He was a member of several learned societies and served as president of the American Historical Association in 1935–1936.
John Geoffrey Henry Hudson, FBA, FRSE, FRHistS is an English medieval historian and Latin translator. He is Professor of Legal History at the University of St Andrews and the William W. Cook Global Law Professor at the University of Michigan Law School. He was educated at Worcester College, Oxford and the University of Toronto (M.A.).
Theodore Frank Thomas Plucknett was a British legal historian who was the first chair of legal history at the London School of Economics.
Robin Fleming is a medieval historian and a professor of history at Boston College. She is the president of the Medieval Academy of America and a 2013 MacArthur Fellow. She has written several books focusing on the people of Roman Britain and early medieval Britain, using both archaeological evidence and written records.
Henry Ansgar Kelly is distinguished research professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Stroud Francis Charles Milsom was an English legal historian, best known for his challenge to aspects of the works of F. W. Maitland. He was Professor of Law at the University of Cambridge from 1976 to 1990 and Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge from 1976 until his death. He was President of the Selden Society from 1985 to 1988.
Cecil Herbert Stuart FifootFBA was a British legal scholar. A fellow of Hertford College, Oxford, from 1924 to 1959, he was known for his works on English legal history and for his textbook on English contract law, commonly known as Cheshire and Fifoot's Law of Contract, now in its seventeenth edition.
Paul Anthony Brand, FBA, FRHistS is a British legal historian. He was Professor of Legal History at the University of Oxford from 2010 to 2014 and a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, from 1999 to 2014.
Michael John Warrender Lobban, FBA is a South African legal historian. He has been Professor of Legal History at the London School of Economics since 2013, having previously been Professor of Legal History at Queen Mary University of London (2003–13).
Albert W. Alschuler is an American legal scholar best known for his work in criminal procedure and criminal law. He is the Julius Kreeger Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago Law School. He previously taught at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Colorado, and the University of Pennsylvania, and is known particularly for a study of plea bargaining.