Raymond T. Diamond

Biography

Ray Diamond re-joined the faculty in 2009. In 2012, he was named Vice Chancellor for Faculty Development & Institutional Advancement, and served in that role for 5 years. He had taught since 1990 at Tulane University, where he held the John Koerner Professorship in Law, was previously the C.J. Morrow Research Professor of Law, and was an Adjunct Professor of African Diaspora Studies. Before his entry into law teaching at LSU in 1984, Professor Diamond spent three years with the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Competition, where he litigated a landmark price signaling case, worked for a year on Capitol Hill as a legislative assistant to Rep. Bob Livingston in the 95th Congress, and practiced law privately in New Orleans.

Prof. Diamond is the co-author of Brown v. Board of Education: Caste, Culture, and the Constitution, which was awarded the 2003 David J. Langum, Sr., Prize by the Langum Project for Historical Literature.  His scholarship in the area of the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms was awarded the 2000 Carter-Knight Freedom Fund Award, and has been cited three times in Supreme Court jurisprudence, most recently in Rogers v. Grewal, 140 S.Ct. 1873, (2020) (Justice Thomas dissenting). He was co-counsel on the amicus brief presented by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller, decided in 2008. His most recent scholarship, "Helpless by Law: Enduring Lessons from a Century-Old Tragedy" (with Robert J. Cottrol), 54 Connecticut Law Review Online; May, 2022), examines questions of violence and self-defense in African American history, in the contexts of crime in American cities and of historical patterns of racist anti-Black violence prevalent in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, as exemplified by the destruction of the Greenwood community in Tulsa Oklahoma in 1921.

Prof. Diamond is a former member of the Board of Editors of the Journal of Southern Legal History and of the Board of Directors of the Louisiana Supreme Court Historical Society, and is a former chair of the Section on Legal History of the Association of American Law Schools.

Courses Taught

Antitrust, Constitutional Law I, Constitutional Law - 14th Amendment, Criminal Law, and Legal History, Race Relations & the Constitution.

Selected Publications

Articles

“Helpless by Law: Enduring Lessons from a Century-Old Tragedy” (with Robert J. Cottrol), 54 Connecticut Law Review Online (May, 2022).

“On the Dangerous Prospect of a Constitutional Convention,” 86 Boulé Journal 42 (2022).

“Refusing Representation and Renewal: Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.'s Experience and Its Impact on Challenges to the Presidential Election of 2020,” 85 Boulé Journal 72 (2021).

“In the Civic Republic: Crime, the Inner City, and the Democracy of Arms - a Disquisition on the Revival of the Militia at Large” (with Robert J. Cottrol), 45 Connecticut Law Review 1605 (2013).

“Federalism in Practice - National and Local Perspectives” (with Ingrid Eagly & Hiroko Kusuda), Symposium on Federalism at Work: State Criminal Law, Immigrants and Immigration Related Activity, 12 Loyola Journal of Public Interest Law 375 (2011).

“Condemned by Substance and Process: A Comment on ‘Doubly Condemned: Adjustments to the Crime and Punishment Regime in the Late Slavery Period in the British Caribbean Colonies’ and ‘Due Process for Louisiana Slaves,’” 18 Cardozo Law Review 753-765 (1997).

“‘Never Intended to be Applied to the White Population:’ Firearms Regulation and Racial Disparity - The Redeemed South’s Legacy to a National Jurisprudence?" (with Robert J. Cottrol), 70 Chicago-Kent Law Review 1307-1335 (1995).

“The Second Amendment: Toward an Afro-Americanist Reconsideration” (with Robert J. Cottrol), 80 Georgetown Law Journal 309-361 (1991).

Books

Brown v. Board of Education: Caste, Culture, and the Constitution (with Robert J. Cottrol & Leland Ware), (2003).

Chapters in Books

“Public Safety and the Right to Bear Arms” (with Robert J. Cottrol) in The Bill of Rights in Modern America at pp. 73-97, David J. Bodenhamer and James W. Ely, Jr., eds. (revised 3rd ed., 2022).

Book Reviews

Raymond T. Diamond, The Fifth Auxiliary Right, in review of Keep and Bear Arms: Origins of an Anglo-American Right, 104 Yale Law Journal 995-1026 (1994).

Electronic Publications

Raymond T. Diamond, Purchase Treaty, The Louisiana Purchase, La Cession de la Louisiana: A History in Maps. Images, and Document on CD-ROM (2003).

Honors & Awards

• Professor of the Year, Paul M. Hebert Law Center, Louisiana State University, awarded by the Student Bar Association; 2022.
• Hurricane Katrina Honor Role, Association of American Law Schools, for service in 2005 as a pro bono consultant to the Louisiana Legislative Black Caucus on voting rights issues in the months following Hurricane Katrina; 2010.
• Dorothy L. Thompson Civil Rights Lecturer; Kansas State University; 2009
• David J. Langum, Sr. Prize, awarded by the Langum Project for Historical Literature; 2003
• Harlan B. Carter - George S. Knight Freedom Fund Award, awarded by the Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association; 1999
• James A. Thomas Lecturer; Yale Law School; 1994