On October 10 (tomorrow) at noon Vincent Blasi of Columbia Law School will speak on "The Versatility and Integrity of Ed Baker" at West Virginia University's law school. Anne Marie Lofaso of WVU will also speak on "Ed Baker's Autonomy Theory of Free Speech: His Final Thoughts on Freedom of Expression." James Weinstein of Arizona State University will present a response to Ed Baker's autonomy theory.
The program, which is the inaugural Baker Lecture for Liberty, Equality, and Democracy, will be webcast live. The lecture series is named for renowned constitutional scholar C. Edwin Baker, a long-time professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Cribbing now from WVU's website announcing the lecture:
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.
WVU also houses Baker's personal papers and much of his library.
I only had the pleasure of meeting Ed Baker once -- back in the summer of 2008 at the SEALS conference. My memory of him is as a wonderfully thoughtful and supremely unassuming and kind man. I'm very sorry that I did not have more of a chance to learn from him in person.
The image at the top right is of Professor Baker.
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