Dick Helmholz, the Mel and Pamela Brown Family Visiting Professor of Law, was greeted by applause from students, faculty and staff as he exited his final class at Anheuser-Busch Hall in late November.
“Dick Helmholz is one of the greatest scholars of medieval canon and common law. Our students were lucky to have him teach our basic property course which is defined by the history of English and Canon Law, and the entire law school benefited from his sharp and incisive thinking on this major area of the law,” said Russell K. Osgood, Dean of the Law School.
It comes as no surprise that the professor who received his LL.B. from Harvard Law School in 1965, earned an A.B. in French literature at Princeton University, and holds a Ph.D. in medieval history from the University of California at Berkeley has a lifelong appreciation of books.
Dr. Helmholz has donated many rare and antique books to the library at WashULaw. Most of the volumes are from the 1500s on the topics of Canon Law, English Common Law, and Natural Law.
In addition to collecting, Dr. Helmholz authored many books as well: Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Cambridge University Press, 1974); The History of the Canon Law and Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction, 597-1649 (Oxford University Press, 2003); Roman Canon Law in Reformation England (Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Natural Law in Court (Harvard University Press, 2015).
Studies in Canon Law and Common Law in Honor of R.H. Helmholz, published in 2015 by the Robbins Collection at the University of California, Berkeley, is a collection of 17 essays by Helmholz’s colleagues and former students that pays tribute to his influence as a scholar and mentor.
Dr. Helmholz’s teaching focused on the law of property and natural resources law. Most recently he taught a course on property, and his research concentrated on legal history. One of Dr. Helmholz’s primary contributions to legal scholarship has been to show the relevance of the Roman and canon laws to the development of the common law.
Among his honors, Dr. Helmholz received a Fulbright Scholarship in 1968, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986 and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Prize in 1992. He served as the Arthur Goodhart Professor of Law at Cambridge University from 2000–01, where he was also elected to a fellowship at Gonville & Caius College. In 2005 he was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School.
Dr. Helmholz’s 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.