Common law scholar to give Constitution lecture

“The Written Constitution and the Unwritten Tradition of Common Law” is the title of the annual Alexander Hamilton Lecture in Constitutional Studies, to be delivered Tuesday, Sept. 16, by James R. Stoner Jr. of Louisiana State University.

Free and open to the public, the talk is scheduled at 5:30 p.m. in the Pohndorff Room, Scribner Library. Skidmore’s Government Department and the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization are sponsors of the event.

Stoner is a professor of political science at Louisiana State University. He is the author of Common-Law Liberty: Rethinking American Constitutionalism (Kansas, 2003) and Common Law and Liberal Theory: Coke, Hobbes, and the Origins of American Constitutionalism (Kansas, 1992), as well as a number of articles and essays. A senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute, he has co-edited two institute-published books, The Social Costs of Pornography: A Collection of Papers (with Donna M. Hughes, 2010), and Rethinking Business Management: Examining the Foundations of Business Education (with Samuel Gregg, 2007).

In 2013-14 Stoner was Garwood Visiting Professor and Visiting Fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He served on the National Council on the Humanities from 2002 to 2006, chaired his department at LSU from 2007 to 2013, and was acting dean of the LSU Honors College in fall 2010.

Stoner earned a B.A. from Middlebury College and a M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University.