Beginning in the spring, the LSU Paul M. Hebert Law Center and the Department of Political Science will offer a new Constitutional law seminar focusing on the effects of judicial personality on Constitutional jurisprudence.
Law Center professor Paul Baier and political science professor James Stoner will co-teach the course at the Law Center. Baier and Stoner decided to collaborate when the Law Center became reintegrated into the University’s main campus in 2015, and both worked closely together in hosting Constitution Day speakers on campus.
Although political scientists have performed studies examining how a judge’s personal attributes relate to the decisions they render, the topic hasn’t been pursued narratively, Stoner said.
“Our idea is that we would look at the whole person … and try to understand the ways in which his view of the world is intertwined with his view of the law,” he said.
Stoner isn’t as interested in categorizing personalities as he is in trying to understand the human mind.
“We will link their personalities and their philosophies to their decisions because their decisions are just dished up — you don’t know why the judge reached that calculus of balance,” Baier said. “Jim Stoner and I are going to make this real through a study of the men and women who make the law, as well as the law itself.”
Students taking the course will study six Supreme Court justices. Stoner will cover Justices John Marshall Harlan, Robert Jackson and Antonin Scalia, while Baier is teaching on Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes, Hugo Black and Anthony Kennedy.
The class’ students will come primarily from the Law Center, Stoner said. The course work will involve dialogue and discussion, as well as reading the judges’ judicial opinions, biographies and other writings.
“We want it to be a lively table. We have something here that will be special because the [implementation] of the instruction and substance of instruction will be that which law students and political science students haven’t had,” Baier said.
Stoner is the director of the Eric Voegelin Institute for American Renaissance Studies, a research body that is part of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and serves to honor the memory of Professor Voegelin, a University Boyd professor and political philosopher.
Baier has taught at the Law Center for more than 40 years. He is the author of several memoirs and is a nationally published playwright.
Both professors are graduates of Harvard Law School.