Ela Leshem

Ela Leshem is a legal theorist who teaches and writes about the property and personhood status of human bodies, nation states, animals, fetuses, religious artifacts, venerated objects, and artificial intelligence. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Georgetown Law Journal, Vanderbilt Law Review, and Yale Law Journal, and received the AALS Emerging Scholar Award for Aging and the Law in 2025.

Before joining Fordham in 2024, Leshem was a fellow at the Senate Judiciary Committee and clerked for Chief Judge David Barron on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Leshem holds a JD and BA from Yale, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Law Journal. During her time at Yale, she worked for Gupta Wessler in D.C., Public Counsel in Los Angeles, Judge Jeffrey Meyer at the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut, and Justice Goodwin Liu at the California Supreme Court.

Leshem studied music at the University of the Arts in Bern, Switzerland, and at the State University of Music in Stuttgart, Germany. She completed a doctorate in philosophy and a masters in political theory at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship.

Representative Publications

Law's Shifting Circles, Georgetown Law Journal, Vol. 114, forthcoming, 2026

Dead Bodies as Quasi-Persons, Vanderbilt Law Review, Vol. 77, No. 4, 2024

Jury Selection as Election: A New Framework for Peremptory Strikes, Yale Law Journal, Vol. 128, No. 8, 2019