John Baker

Professor Emeritus

Paul M. Hebert Law Center, Louisiana State University

John Baker

Professor Emeritus

Paul M. Hebert Law Center, Louisiana State University

Dr. John Baker is a Visiting Professor at The Center for the Constitution, Georgetown Law School and Visiting Professor at Peking University School of Transnational Law. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Oriel College, the University of Oxford (2012-2014) and taught a course at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford in 2014. He is Professor Emeritus of Law, and previously the Dale E. Bennett Professor of Law, at Louisiana State University Law School. He was an adjunct Fellow at the Heritage Foundation (Spring, 2008) and a Distinguished Scholar at the Catholic University of America Law School (2011-12). He has also taught at Tulane Law School, George Mason Law School, Pepperdine Law School, New York Law School, Hong Kong University, and the University of Dallas, School of Management He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Lyon III (France) (1999-2011) and at the Universidad de los Andes, Chile, where he was a Fulbright Specialist in 2012. He has lectured at universities and research institutes in Argentina, Austria, Brazil, China, Croatia, Peru, Slovenia, Taiwan, Vietnam, and the Philippines, where he was a Fulbright Fellow (2006).

Dr. Baker received his J.D., with honors, from the University of Michigan Law School and his B.A., magna cum laude, from the University of Dallas. He also earned a Ph.D. in Political Thought from the University of London.

Baker has taught over a dozen different subjects, mostly in the area of public law. His main areas of interest are Constitutional Law (particularly federalism and separation of powers), Criminal Law, Anti-Terrorism Law, International Law, Health Care Law, Mediation, and Comparative Law.

In addition to law review articles and book chapters, Dr. Baker’s academic publications include: Hall’s Criminal Law: Cases and Materials (with Benson, Force and George; 5th ed. Michie, 1993); An Introduction to the Law of the United States (ed. with Levasseur; University Press of America, 1992). He has also published on Forbes.com, FoxNews.com, in The Washington Times, and a number of times in The Wall Street Journal.

He argues in federal court, including two oral arguments in the U.S. Supreme Court. For years, he taught courses for the Federalist Society on separation of powers with the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. In September, 2016, he taught a Supreme Court seminar in China with Justice Samuel Alito.

Following law school, he served as a law clerk in federal district court and as an assistant district attorney in New Orleans before joining LSU in 1975.  While a professor, he has been as a consultant to USAID, USIA (now part of the State Department), the Justice Department, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Separation of Powers, and the Office of Planning in the White House.  He served on an ABA Task Force which issued the report, The Federalization of Crime (1998) and later as a consultant to the “Bi-Partisan Task Force on the Over-federalization of Crime” (2012-2014) created by the U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime.

Dr. Baker was a co-founder of the first iteration (1995) of Stratfor Inc., a global intelligence agency. He co-authored its first book: The Intelligence Edge (with Friedman, Friedman and Chapman; Crown Books/Random House 1997).

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Contributions

Originally Speaking: Climate Change and Common Law Public Nuisance

Daniel Lungren, Donald Kochan, Patrick Parenteau, Richard Faulk, and John Baker

December 7, 2018

Originally Speaking is a written debate series that approaches a contemporary topic from diverse perspectives. The Federalist Society takes no position and encourages a clear and constructive exchange on the subject. Posts in an OS series chain off of each other in waves, creating a loose stream of dialogue.

The focus of this series is if climate change is eligible for common law public nuisance claims, as articulated in the lawsuits by CA and NY municipalities against several major oil and gas companies. We hope you enjoy this Originally Speaking series.

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