Baker
MORGANTOWN -– West Virginia University's College of Law will house the collected works of C. Edwin Baker, a renowned First Amendment and media legal scholar and attorney.
Baker was the Gallicchio Professor of Law and Communication at the University of Pennsylvania Law School when he died suddenly last year. His family has donated his collected works to the George R. Farmer Jr. Law Library.
In celebration, the College along with the family have also endowed an annual C. Edwin Baker Lecture for Liberty, Equality and Democracy to be held at WVU. The inaugural lecture will be held Oct. 10 at noon in the College's Marlyn E. Lugar Courtroom. A reception will precede the lecture at 11 a.m.
"This lecture and his collected works represents the legacy of one of most important constitutional law scholars of the 20th Century and we are honored to be asked to provide a home for this significant body of work preserving Professor Baker's legacy for current and future legal scholars," said Professor Anne M. Lofaso, who teaches labor law at WVU and studied under Baker at UPenn.
"This endowment helps keep Ed alive," she said.
Speakers include:
* Vincent Blasi, 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, Blasi has served on the law faculties of the University of Texas, the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia, as well as Columbia, where he teaches torts in addition to a variety of courses and seminars on the First Amendment.
* James Weinstein, the Amelia Lewis Professor of Constitutional Law at the Sandra Day O'Connor School of Law at Arizona University. In addition he is a faculty fellow at the Center for Law, Science & Innovation; and an associate fellow, Centre for Public Law, University of Cambridge. Weinstein's areas of academic interest are constitutional law, especially free speech, as well as jurisprudence, federal courts, civil procedure and legal history.
* Lofaso, professor of law and associate dean for faculty research and development at WVU. Lofaso writes primarily in the areas of labor law, comparative labor law, mine safety and health and the jurisprudential foundations of labor law.
Complete biographies of the speakers and their topics, a description of the collection, and a link to the webcast of the lecture can be found at http://law.wvu.edu/bakerlecture.
Stewart Plein, a visiting librarian at the College of Law Library, has catalogued the Baker Collection. 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 Baker's life is represented in the archive.