Common Law Expert James Stoner Presents Atwood Lecture

James R. Stoner, Jr., Louisiana State University professor and an expert on common law, will present this semester's Atwood Lecture at Salve Regina University on Thursday, Oct. 28, at 7 p.m.

Stoner will lecture on "Tradition and Modernity: The Original Constitution and the Supreme Court Today" in Bazarsky Lecture Hall, located in O'Hare Academic Center, 100 Ochre Point Ave. The talk is free and open to the public.

Stoner is professor of political science at LSU, where he has taught since 1988.  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.  

He is the 2010 recipient of the Honors College Sternberg Professorship at LSU and is serving this fall as acting dean there. In 2009 he was named a Senior Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, N.J., with whom he co-edited two recent collections of essays, "The Social Costs of Pornography" and "Rethinking Business Management."

Stoner's recent research has ranged from topics in American political thought and constitutionalism to a study of the political thought of St. Thomas More. He has chaired the department of political science at LSU since 2007; was a visiting fellow in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University in 2002-03; and served by presidential appointment on the National Council on the Humanities from 2002 to 2006.

Stoner earned his A.B. from Middlebury College, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University.