Professor of Law

Alan Howard believes that although the First Amendment is a relative latecomer to the legal scene, it has more than made up for lost time. “The amendment was ratified in 1791,” he says, “but it wasn’t until 1919 that the U.S. Supreme Court began to interpret it. And since then, the Court has rendered at least one free speech decision each term.”

The Court’s absorption with the First Amendment mirrors Professor Howard’s. After graduating from the University of Chicago School of Law in 1972, he joined Sidley & Austin in Chicago where he worked with Newton Minnow, a partner and former Federal Communications Commission chairman under President John F. Kennedy. A Washington, D.C., native, Professor Howard transferred a year later to the firm’s office in the nation’s capital. The firm defended the First Amendment rights of a stable of media clients, including CBS and the nation’s first cable television operators.

The University of Georgia-Athens recruited Howard from private practice by hiring him to become the first director of the newly created Legislative Research Division in its Institute of Government. The research division was established to provide unbiased research to Georgia legislators. He had a joint appointment in the political science department, teaching several courses, including criminal justice and a seminar on free speech, and he was a frequent guest speaker in the law school.

“I sort of fell into teaching, but it was a graceful fall,” Howard says. “I enjoy every aspect of the learning-teaching process.”

In 1977, Howard joined Saint Louis University School of Law as an assistant professor and began establishing himself as an expert on the First Amendment. He wrote the School’s first course description and syllabus for the First Amendment and has been teaching the class ever since.

The bulk of his scholarship focuses on the First Amendment — free speech in particular. His most recent article, “Continuity on the Court: The Rehnquist Court’s Free Speech Cases” (47 Saint Louis University Law Journal, 835), tracks the Court’s decisions over the past 16 years.

“Between 1986 and 2002, the Rehnquist Court rendered 106 decisions in free speech cases,” Professor Howard says. “That’s more than six percent of the Court’s caseload. It’s a prolific area of constitutional adjudication, which is one of the reasons I never tire of teaching it.”