The lecturer this year is Prof Dick Helmholtz, who will speak on “Natural Law and Magna Carta.”

Dick Helmholz came to the University of Chicago in 1981 after teaching for ten years at Washington University in St. Louis. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he also received an AB in French literature from Princeton University and a PhD in medieval history from the University of California at Berkeley.

In the course of his career, he has been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize. In the academic year 2000 to 2001, he served as Arthur Goodhart Professor of Law in Cambridge University, where he was also elected to a fellowship at Gonville and Caius College. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, a Member of the American Law Institute, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

His teaching interests have been centered in the law of property and in various aspects of natural resources law. His research interests have been concentrated in legal history. In the latter, his principal contribution has been to show the relevance of the Roman and canon laws to the development of the common law.