C. EDWIN BAKER

BAKER--C. Edwin (Ed). A public Memorial Service honoring the life of C. Edwin (Ed) Baker will be held Sunday, January 31 in the Moot Court Room at Cardozo School of Law, 55 Fifth Avenue (5th Ave. at 12th St.), New York City at 2pm. Professor Baker, age 62, died unexpectedly on December 8, 2009. At the time of his death he was the Nicholas F. Gallicchio Professor of Law and Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He also held a joint appointment at Penn's Annenberg School of Communications. Ed Baker was one of the nation's leading constitutional law and media policy scholars. He published four books, Media Concentration and Democracy: Why Ownership Matters (Cambridge, 2007), Media, Markets, and Democracy (Cambridge, 2002), Advertising and a Democratic Press (Princeton, 1994), and Human Liberty and Freedom of Speech (Oxford, 1989). He also authored over 70 articles and book chapters, as well as numerous op-ed pieces, including two in the New York Times. Yale Professor Jack Balkin describes Ed Baker as "the finest media law scholar of his generation." Professor Monroe Price, the director of the Annenberg Center for Global Communication Studies states: "There was no scholar so committed, passionate, disciplined and wise in thinking through the relationship between the media and the political system." Professor Robert McChesney of SavetheNews.org writes that: "It is impossible to gauge the immensity of the loss with Ed Baker's passing. His commitment to a strong free press and a vibrant democracy guided all of his work." Baker's most recent work focused on equality and on the threats to democracy posed by the concentration of media ownership, the subject of his recent testimony before Congress. Raised in Madisonville, Kentucky, Ed Baker was a graduate of Stanford University and Yale College of Law. He was a fellow at Harvard three times, most recently at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He was a resident of Greenwich Village for over 20 years. Ed was predeceased by his parents, Falcon O. and Ernestine Magagna Baker. He is survived by his sister, Dr. Nancy Lynn Baker of El Granada, CA, a professor at Fielding Graduate University, her spouse Cathy Hauer, seven first cousins, a number of close longtime friends, and his girlfriend Jennifer Mathews. His cremated remains will be interred in April in Madisonville, KY. Memorial Contributions in his honor should be made to the ACLU, the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation, Oxfam, or another charity honoring Ed's commitment to human rights and free speech.