Faculty Profile: Stewart Harris

Stewart Harris is the Associate Director of the Abraham Lincoln Institute for the Study of Leadership and Public Policy at Lincoln Memorial University, where he also teaches constitutional law.

 

Professor Harris graduated from Princeton University in 1983.  In his sophomore year, he was selected for admission to the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, a multidisciplinary program spanning the Departments of Politics, History, Sociology and Economics.  His independent work at the Wilson School focused primarily upon international security and nuclear weapons policy. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in Philadelphia in 1986, where he and his partner won the Law School's Edwin R. Keedy moot court championship.

 

Professor Harris then worked for the federal government in Washington, DC, where he spent four years on Capitol Hill advising the Army Corps of Engineers on civil works projects throughout the continental United States.  His duties included drafting congressional testimony for the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works.

 

Professor Harris subsequently worked for a large private law firm before establishing his own practice in Florida with his wife, Priscilla Harris.  In Florida, the Harrises concentrated on environmental, civil rights and First Amendment law, notably obtaining a half-million dollars for a public official who had been libeled by a newspaper.

 

In 1999, Professor Harris began teaching at the University of Florida College of Law.  From 2001 to 2016, he taught at the Appalachian School of Law, where he earned the Faculty Scholarship Award and multiple awards for teaching.  While at ASL, he also taught Constitutional Law during the summer semester at the University of Tennessee College of Law.  In 2016, he moved to Lincoln Memorial University’s Law School.

 

In 2011, Professor Harris created a public radio show, Your Weekly Constitutional, which is produced at WETS-FM, the NPR affiliate in Johnson City, Tennessee, and syndicated nationally.  YWC is underwritten by the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution at Montpelier, the historic home of the Father of the Constitution, James Madison.  The show is on Facebook and Twitter, and podcasts are available on iTunes and Spotify.

 

The Harrises have two sons:  Tom, an honors graduate of Caltech, and Ben, who graduated with highest distinction from the University of Virginia and who subsequently spent a year in Beijing as a Schwarzman Scholar.