Assistant Professor of Law


What is the precise relationship between popular democracy and legal rights?  This is one of the questions that interests Professor Anders Walker. Voted Teacher of the Year in 2009, Walker uses American Legal History to illustrate how electoral politics, national security concerns, and vigilantism determine the enforceability of legal rights, even those deemed inalienable or fundamental. The author of a new book on how southern moderates undermined black rights claims in the American South, Walker began to get interested in what he calls “democracy’s double edge” while pursuing a Ph.D. in African American Studies and History at Yale.

“When people think about minority rights,” posits Walker, “they often think about racial minorities. Yet, our nation’s founders stressed the importance of minority rights as a check against majority misrule.  It is what makes our Republic unique.” 

Since coming to St. Louis, Walker has expanded his scope of inquiry to include criminal defendants, gun rights advocates, and proponents of property rights at the turn of the Twentieth Century. In his next book, Rights & Reactions: Herbert Wechsler and the Art of Reform, Walker examines how Columbia Law Professor Herbert Wechsler reconciled minority rights and majority rule from the 1930s through the 1960s. Writing against scholars who have pilloried Wechsler for criticizing Brown v. Board of Education in 1959, Walker shows how Wechsler consistently advanced the cause of racial minorities and criminal defendants without incurring popular backlash. His most recent piece on Wechsler’s transformation of criminal law teaching won the 2009 Junior Scholar Award from the AALS Section on Criminal Justice.