Law Professor C. Edwin Baker died Tuesday

Penn Law professor C. Edwin Baker died Tuesday in New York City, according to a press release on Penn Law’s web site. He was 62.

According to the release, Baker died while exercising. The cause of death is not yet known, said Jeanne Leong, a spokeswoman for the Law School.

Baker, the Nicholas F. Gallicchio Professor of Law and Communication, was an expert on the First Amendment and on mass media policy.

He has also been a professor in the Annenberg School for Communication since 2007.

Law School Dean Michael Fitts called Baker a “major scholar,” praising Baker’s work on the First Amendment as “a distinctive but powerful view.”

Baker joined the Penn faculty in 1981, according to his profile on the Law School web site.

Fitts remembered arriving at Penn as a young professor and noting Baker’s friendly, welcoming nature.

“Ed was a very gentle human being,” Fitts said, despite his “very strong academic and political views.”

“He loved the underdog,” Fitts added. “He was very supportive of people who were in a precarious position.”

Baker’s popularity wasn’t just constrained to Penn Law, Fitts said, as he took a number of sabbaticals during his time as a professor. Most recently, Baker taught at the New York University School of Law in 2001, according to the Penn Law web site.

He also served as a staff lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union in New York from 1987 to 1989.

There will be a memorial service for Baker Jan. 31, 2010, in New York City, according to the release.

Any person wishing to contribute comments or additional information should e-mail Daily Pennsylvanian Managing Editor-elect Samantha Sharf at sharf@dailypennsylvanian.com.

Comments (3)

Professor Baker was considered one of the country’s foremost authorities on the First Amendment and on mass media policy. Most recently, he focused his work on the economics of the news business, political philosophy, and jurisprudential questions concerning the egalitarian and libertarian bases of constitutional theory. “Ed Baker was a brilliant scholar, a dedicated teacher and a wonderful friend,” said Penn Law Dean Michael A. Fitts. “Generations of students and lawyers benefitted from his insights, his high expectations and his caring approach to everyone around him. His death is a great loss for the Penn Law community as well as for the larger community of academicians and practitioners focused on free speech, the media and human rights.”His work was read and respected by policy makers and students in the United States and internationally. Just this past summer, he taught a course on communication policy, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press at Communication University of China in Beijing. Earlier this year, Professor Baker told a Congressional subcommittee that "huge actual layoffs of journalists as well as threatened closures of towns' only daily are a major threat to democracy. When people are reading newspapers, corruption goes down." In January, he wrote an essay calling for a targeted federal tax credit to help newspapers hire more journalists, instead of laying them off.“It is always a pleasure

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Coming in with high expectations and his caring approach to everyone around him. His death is a great loss for the Penn Law community as well as for the larger community of academicians and practitioners focused on free speech, the media and human rights.”His work was read and respected by policy makers and students in the United States.

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