12 p.m., Monday, October 10, 2011
Marlyn E. Lugar Courtroom
WVU Law Center
The West Virginia University College of Law with the support of the C. Edwin Baker family have established a lecture to honor the legacy of the late C. Edwin Baker, the former Nicholas F. Gallicchio Professor of Law and Communication at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
The West Virginia University College of Law wishes to thank the Baker Family for their generosity and the trust that they express in their decision to endow a lecture and house the collected works of C. Edwin Baker in the George R. Farmer, Jr. Law Library at the College of Law. We are honored to be asked to provide a home for this significant body of work preserving this legacy for current and future legal scholars.
The Lecture
The Versatility and Integrity of Ed Baker
Vincent Blasi
Corliss Lamont Professor of Civil Liberties
Columbia Law School
Ed Baker’s Autonomy Theory of Free Speech: His Final Thoughts on Freedom of Expression
Anne Marie Lofaso
Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development
Professor of Law
West Virginia University College of Law
A Response to Ed Baker’s Autonomy Theory
James Weinstein
Amelia D. Lewis Professor of Constitutional Law
Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law
Arizona State University
A Bakerian Reply to Weinstein’s Critique
Anne Marie Lofaso
Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development
Professor of Law
West Virginia University College of Law
A reception will be held before the lecture at 11:00 a.m. in the WVU Law Center lobby.
Bios:
Vincent Blasi is the Corliss Lamont Professor of Civil Liberties at Columbia Law School. His undergraduate degree (in economics) is from Northwestern and his law degree is from the University of Chicago, where he studied with the renowned First Amendment scholar Harry Kalven, Jr. During his 45 years in law teaching, Professor Blasi has served on the law faculties of the University of Texas (1967-70), the University of Michigan (1970-83), and the University of Virginia (1998-2009), as well as Columbia (since 1983), where he teaches torts in addition to a variety of courses and seminars on the First Amendment. He has been a visiting professor at Stanford, the University of California Berkeley, and William & Mary. He has published many articles about the history and theory of the freedom of speech, including The Checking Value in First Amendment Theory (1977), The Pathological Perspective and the First Amendment (1985),_ The First Amendment and the Ideal of Civic Courage_ (1988), Learned Hand and the Self-Government Theory of the First Amendment (1990), Milton’s Areopagitica and the Modern First Amendment (1995), Free Speech and Good Character (1999), Holmes and the Marketplace of Ideas (2005), and Shouting ‘Fire!’ in a Theater and Vilifying Corn Dealers (2011), as well as articles on a host of specific topics, including mass demonstrations, press subpoenas, defamation, newsgathering, access to the press, prior restraint, freedom of association, school library censorship, commercial advertising, nude dancing, campaign finance, and the pledge of allegiance. His innovative casebook Ideas of the First Amendment (2006) introduced a history-of-ideas approach to the study of First Amendment law. In 1998, Professor Blasi was one of five law professors in the nation elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
James Weinstein is the Amelia Lewis Professor of Constitutional Law at the Sandra Day O’Conner School of Law at Arizona University. In addition he is a Faculty Fellow, Center for Law, Science & Innovation; and an Associate Fellow, Centre for Public Law, University of Cambridge. Professor Weinstein’s areas of academic interest are Constitutional Law, especially Free Speech, as well as Jurisprudence, Federal Courts, Civil Procedure and Legal History. He is co-editor of Extreme Speech and Democracy, and has written numerous articles in law review symposia on a variety of free speech topics, including: obscenity doctrine, institutional review boards, commercial speech, database protection, campaign finance reform, the relationship between free speech and other constitutional rights, hate crimes, and campus speech codes. Professor Weinstein also has written several articles on the history of personal jurisdiction and its implication for modern doctrine.
Professor Weinstein also has been a principal speaker at numerous national and international conferences on free speech issues.
During law school, he was a member of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review Board of Officers. After graduating, he served as a law clerk to James R. Browning, Chief Judge of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and then practiced civil litigation in Los Angeles for several years before joining the faculty in 1986. Professor Weinstein has litigated several significant free speech cases, primarily on behalf of the Arizona Civil Liberties Union.
Anne Marie Lofaso is Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development at the West Virginia University College of Law, where she teaches Labor Law, Employment Law, and Jurisprudence. Professor Lofaso writes primarily in the areas of labor law, comparative labor law, mine safety and health, and the jurisprudential foundations of labor law. She is a prolific author of scholarly articles, policy papers, and popular pieces.
Professor Lafaso’s major publications include What We Owe Our Coal Miners, 5 Harv. L. & Pol’y Rev. 87 (2011); September Massacre: The Latest Battle in the War on Workers’ Rights Under the National Labor Relations Act , reprinted in A FRESH START FOR A NEW ADMINISTRATION: REFORMING LAW AND JUSTICE POLICIES (American Constitution Society for Law and Policy 2008); and Toward a Foundational Theory of Workers’ Rights: The Autonomous Dignified Worker, 76 U.M.K.C. L. Rev. 1 (2007). She is also a co‑author on MODERN LABOR LAW IN THE PRIVATE AND PUBLIC SECTORS: CASES AND MATERIALS (with Seth Harris, Joseph Slater, and David Gregory) (LEXIS publishing, forthcoming 2012). Her current research focuses on the question whether empirical studies and/or jurisprudential rationales justify raising the statutory floor of rights or encouraging the practice of collective bargaining. She is a contributing editor to the online journal Jotwell (reviewing labor law articles); a senior editor of an international labor law treatise; and a contributing editor for a major labor law treatise.
Before entering teaching, Lofaso was a senior attorney with the National Labor Relations Board’s Appellate and Supreme Court Branches. Lofaso earned her A.B., magna cum laude, Harvard University, J.D., University of Pennsylvania, and D.Phil., University of Oxford.
C. Edwin Baker (May 28, 1947 – December 8, 2009), the Nicholas F. Gallicchio Professor of Law and Communication at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, was a leading scholar of constitutional law, communications law, and free speech. Baker was considered one of the country’s foremost authorities on the First Amendment and on mass media policy. His most recent scholarship focused on the economics of the news business, political philosophy, and jurisprudential questions concerning the egalitarian and libertarian bases of constitutional theory. Baker was a native of Madisonville, Kentucky. He received his bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and his law degree from Yale University. He was a law and humanities fellow at Harvard University in 1974, a fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Barone Center in 1992, and a Radcliffe fellow there in 2006.
Scope of the C. Edwin Baker Collection
The central focus of the C. Edwin (“Ed”) Baker Collection is the life and work of one of most important constitutional law scholars of the twentieth century. Professor Baker was deeply connected not only to his work but also to the broader academic community. He was actively involved with organizations and projects that supported his view of how the world should be. Each facet of Professor Baker’s life is represented in the Baker Collection archive.
The collection represents the broad spectrum of Baker’s life, which includes highs school homework projects and assignments; college projects and papers; law school and post-graduate papers; and the publications and talks of his later academic career. The decades of the 1970’s through the 1990’s, as Baker developed his first book, HUMAN LIBERTY AND FREEDOM OF SPEECH, are well-represented in the archive with chapter drafts, as well as working notes for articles and course development materials.
The scope of the collection includes correspondence, newspaper clippings, course materials, talks, book and article drafts, a large collection of papers from the Colloquium in Legal, Political, and Social Philosophy at New York University hosted by Professors Ronald Dworkin and Thomas Nagel. Lectures, and other professional activities are also among the collection’s inventory, including a diary of his Nicaraguan journey in the early 1980’s and his visit to Rwanda in his last years. A work in progress, the collection also contains fifty nine 5¼ floppy diskettes and one hundred and twenty seven 3½ floppy diskettes, most of the information retrieved at this time has yielded correspondence, memorandum, and article drafts. Recently added to the archive was Baker’s personal library of over 500 books, many heavily annotated and underlined.
Baker Collection Finding Aid for materials in the Colborn Rare Book Room, West Virginia University College of Law, George R. Farmer, Jr. Law Library.