Profile

Professor Helfman teaches contract law, constitutional law, international law, and law of the sea at the Syracuse University College of Law. She spent 2009-10 as the Olin/Searle Fellow at the New York University School of Law conducting research on counterproliferation, maritime law, and legal history. Her current research interests include the laws of armed conflict, maritime piracy, and Anglo-American constitutional history.

 

A British Marshall Scholar and a graduate of Yale Law School, Professor Helfman spent three years as an associate at Debevoise and Plimpton LLP, where she was a member of the International Dispute Resolution and Securities and White Collar Defense practice groups. Her pro bono work included death penalty cases, habeas petitions, and disability rights advocacy. While at Yale, Professor Helfman was awarded the Joseph Parker Prize for Legal History and the Yale Journal of International Law Young Scholar Award.

Francis Biddle and the Nuremberg Legacy: Waking the Human Conscience, 15 Journal Jurisprudence (2012)

Marauders in the Courts: Why the Federal Courts Have Got the Problem of Maritime Piracy (Partly) Wrong, 62 Syracuse Law Review 53 (2012).  
 
Commerce on Trial: Neutral Rights and Private Warfare in the Seven Years' War in Trade and War: Neutral Commerce in the Inter-State System, ed. Koen Stapelbroek, 14 (2011).  Available at https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/25842/010_03_Helfman_2011.pdf?sequence=1
 

Land Ownership and the Origins of Fiduciary Duty, 41 Real Property Probate & Trust Journal 651 (2006).
 
The Court of Vice-Admiralty at Sierra Leone and the Abolition of the West African Slave Trade, 115 Yale Law Journal 1122 (2006).   Available at http://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/115-5/Helfman.pdf

 

Neutrality, the Law of Nations and the Natural Law Tradition, 30 Yale Journal of International Law 549 (2005).  

The Law of Nations in The Federalist Papers, 23 Journal of Legal History 190 (2002).