John S. Baker, Jr., J.D. University of Michigan (1972), is the Dale E. Bennett Professor of Law at Louisiana State University Law Center where he teaches Constitutional Law, Criminal Law, Federal Courts, and Jurisprudence. Professor Baker has served as a law clerk in federal district court, an assistant district attorney in New Orleans, and as a consultant to 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 a report entitled The Federalization of Crime (1998). He has argued constitutional and criminal issues in various courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. In addition to numerous articles, his writing includes the following books: The Intelligence Edge: How to Profit in the Information Age (with Friedman, Friedman and Chapman); Hall's Criminal Law: Cases and Materials (with Benson, Force and George; 5th ed.); An Introduction to the Law of the United States (ed. with Levasseur).
Professor Baker is director of the distance-learning project for the American Academy of Liberal Education, which is the only national (as opposed to regional) accreditation agency recognized by the U.S. Department of Education for undergraduate-degree programs. He is the academic liason from the LSU Law School to the Louisiana Board of Regents' Distance Learning Initiative.
Professor Baker has been involved in distance learning since teaching college-credit courses in 1990 on American Government, which were distributed live via satellite. He has been a consultant on the video-conferencing aspects of "Courtrooms of the Future." During the 1999-2000 academic year, he will teach a course in Constitutional Law to post-graduate law students at the University of Lyon III (France) which combines on-site, Internet, and video teaching.