Professor Raymond T. Diamond

Raymond T. Diamond is the James Carville Alumni Professor and Jules F. & Francis L. Landry Distinguished Professor at Louisiana State University Law Center, where he teaches criminal law and constitutional law and is co-director of the Pugh Institute for Justice. His scholarship is at the nexus of constitutional law, race, and legal history.

He 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.