LOGAN — He has spent his life teaching. And while his role as a teacher has catapulted him into the position of president of Utah State University, Kermit L. Hall remains focused on his life's work.
He is possibly the most published university president in the nation. Even while recently publishing two new books on constitutional law and spending his days running Utah's land grant university, Hall still finds time to teach history and educate the nation through his writing about a document — the U.S. Constitution — he calls "brilliant."
"Both of these books are really efforts to humanize, to demystify the law and in so doing make it a more accessible subject and make the Constitution more readily understood," said Hall. "While lawyers have to work with the law, people have to live with it."
Hall is the editor-in-chief of the "Oxford Companion to American Law." Published in May, the book is an 864-page reference encyclopedia covering a variety of legal issues from Bush vs. Gore to the Salem Witch Trials, all indexed in alphabetical order and written in plain English. It contains some 500 entries from more than 300 legal experts and was edited and overseen by Hall. And it's being lauded as a "landmark in legal publishing."
But it's not just for lawyers or college professors, says Hall.
"Given the complex nature of the subject, I tried very, very hard to make the book readable," said Hall, "so that anyone from a high school student to a federal appeals court judge or even a Supreme Court justice (or) a citizen interested in the law to a practicing lawyer could read it and understand it and appreciate it and value it."
A second book, released earlier this year, helps put Hall at the forefront of constitutional law expertise. "Constitutionalism and American Culture: Writing the New Constitutional History," published by the University Press of Kansas, is a collection of essays edited in part by Hall. The book demonstrates how the Constitution has remained the strong center of an ever-changing nation.
"The Constitution in the end is a brilliant solution to the problem of maintaining a stable form of government while permitting change over time," says Hall. "The law is a form of civic religion in the United States. In the middle of the sanctuary is the Constitution."
Hall was on hand Saturday for a book signing at Borders Bookstore in downtown Salt Lake City. But he hasn't let success go to his head.
He sees himself as an educator first and foremost, an equal to his colleagues. It's just as important for a university president to get published as it is for a professor, says Hall.
These are books Nos. 11 and 12 for Hall. But he isn't stopping there.
"I just signed a contract for another book, a new case book, on American legal history with Oxford University Press. Literally just signed it," said Hall.
Due out sometime next year, the book will be co-authored by Paul Finkelman and Jim Ely, two noted historians, who, by coincidence, taught alongside Hall at the University of Akron in Ohio before he moved into administration. The book will be used in law schools and in undergraduate courses of constitutional legal history like the one that will be taught by Hall this fall at USU.
Other projects under way include a revision of Hall's 1989 "The Magic Mirror: Law in American History," which will serve as a companion to the legal history case book and be released simultaneously.
Hall also plans to revise "The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States," his award-winning 1992 volume.
Yet another book by Hall, this one about the U.S. Supreme Court case of New York Times v. Sullivan, is about halfway finished, said Hall.
"It's just a wonderful case. It's the intersection of constitutional development, the Supreme Court, (and) race relations."
Why write so much on one topic? It's a subject holding great passion for Hall, with a strong foundation of faith and belief rooted in American government.
"I think it's a subject that provides the opportunity to see the way in which the nation functions you can't get any other way."
E-mail: logan reporter@attbi.com