Ray Diamond re-joined the faculty in 2009 and in 2012 he was named Vice Chancellor for Faculty Development and Institutional Advancement. 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.
Professor Diamond has written widely in the area of constitutional law, race relations, and legal history. His scholarship in the area of the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms twice has been cited in Supreme Court jurisprudence, most recently in McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010) (Justice Thomas concurring), and has been awarded the 2000 Carter-Knight Freedom Fund Award. In connection with the issues he has raised in his Second Amendment scholarship, 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. 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 most recent scholarship is “In the Civic Republic: Crime, the Inner City, and the Democracy of Arms - a Disquisition on the Revival of the Militia at Large,” published in the Connecticut Law Review, and he has begun work on a book under contract to the University Press of Kansas, on the new Second Amendment jurisprudence of the Supreme Court.
Professor 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.