C. Edwin Baker

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

C. Edwin Baker is the Nicholas F. Gallicchio Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. His scholarship has concerned legal philosophy, economics, constitutional law, and media policy.

Baker’s current work involves a multiyear project that explores the features necessary for the legitimacy of legal obligation—a question that leads quickly to the basis of morality or normativity. The project then asks how these particular answers affect the necessary content of a constitutional order. Baker’s claims develop out of an application of critical theory, especially Jürgen Habermas’s philosophy of communicative action. During his year at Radcliffe, Baker will work out the implications of this approach for a theory of fundamental equality. He will note differences from more common Kantian theories and assert the superiority of this approach to equality.

Baker received his BA from Stanford University and his JD from Yale University. He has published widely and is best known for his work on speech freedom, including the book Human Liberty and Freedom of Speech (Oxford University Press, 1989), and, more recently, for applying democratic and economic theory to media policy. This later work includes Media, Markets and Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2002), which won the 2002 McGannon Communications Policy Research Award for the best work in communications policy or ethics, and Media Concentration and Democracy: Why Ownership Matters (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press).