John S. Baker

Professor Baker will be teaching Constitutional Law Seminar: The Federalist Understanding in the spring semester. He is the Dale E. Bennett Professor of Law at Louisiana State University Law Center. Since 1999, Professor Baker has been an Invited Professor at the University of Lyon III (France). He was a Fulbright scholar in the Philippines (2006). He regularly argues in federal court, including having had oral arguments in the U.S. Supreme Court. He has taught a number of short-courses on separation of powers with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

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 a consultant to the Justice Department, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Separation of Powers, the Office of Planning in the White House, USIA (now part of the State Department) and USAID. He served on an ABA Task Force that issued the report, The Federalization of Crime (1998). His writing includes the following books: The Intelligence Edge (with Friedman, Friedman and Chapman; Crown Books/Random House 1997); 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), as well as articles both on the over-federalization of criminal law and the "war on terrorism."