Helene Silverberg

Helene Silverberg is Lecturer in the Law School and Visiting Senior Lecturer in the Human Rights Program.  She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Cornell University, where she received the John L. Senior Fellowship. From 1987 to 1994, she was an Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton University. After receiving her JD at the University of California, Berkeley, she worked as a Staff Attorney at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She has also been a Staff Attorney at the Center for Justice and Accountability in San Francisco, focusing on human rights abuses in East Africa. She was a member of the original legal team in Yousuf v. Samantar, an international human rights case against a former Prime Minister of Somalia that will be argued before the United States Supreme Court later this year.  She will be a Fulbright Fellow at Bogazici University in Istanbul this Spring. 

Her areas of interest include international courts and tribunals, universal jurisdiction, the role of national courts in the prosecution of international crimes, and the reform and reconstruction of legal institutions in transitional societies.