Dr. Jim Staab

Professor, American Politics and Law

Dr. James Staab received his B.A. from Roanoke College, his J.D. from the University of Richmond and his Ph. D. from the University of Virginia. He has taught at the University of Central Missouri since August 1998.  His primary area of specialization is public law, broadly defined, including American constitutional law, civil rights and liberties, judicial politics, criminal procedure, comparative constitutional law and jurisprudence.  He has authored or co-authored articles or book chapters on various Supreme Court justices, including Levi Woodbury, Benjamin Cardozo and Antonin Scalia.  In 2006, he published a book on Justice Scalia titled The Political Thought of Justice Antonin Scalia: A Hamiltonian on the Supreme Court (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield), which resulted in a visit to campus by Justice Scalia.  In 2022, he published  Limits of Constraint:  The Originalist Jurisprudence of Hugo Black, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas), which represents a challenge to originalism as a theory of constitutional interpretation.  Dr. Staab received the Governor’s Award for Excellence in Education in 2012 and the Byler Award, UCM’s most distinguished faculty award, in 2014.