A professor at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG) has been awarded the George Eastman Professorship at the University of Oxford, a prestigious visiting professorship that allows “American scholars of the highest distinction” to lecture at Oxford for one year.

Frederick Schauer, Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at the KSG, will serve as a visiting professor for the 2007-08 academic year, and will concurrently hold a fellowship at Balliol College at Oxford.

Schauer, one of the nation’s foremost authorities on the First Amendment, political theory, and constitutional law, said he first learned of his candidacy for the position when the faculty at Harvard Law School (HLS) selected him as their nominee.

“I was flattered to be put into competition with the physicists, biologists, and other academics who were nominated, as this is not a field-specific competition,” he said.

After learning that he had been selected for the post, Schauer said he was “surprised, honored, and remarkably flattered.”

“It is a genuine honor to be considered among such renowned academics,” Schauer said.

Though Schauer often focuses on the U.S. Constitution and the First Amendment in his research, he said his work is theory-based and can also apply to British political philosophy.

“Much of my work is not just on American issues,” Schauer said. “I focus on free speech and political theory as philosophical problems and not just as problems with the First Amendment. I’m doing increasingly more comparative work on the Constitution and will take advantage of the fact that the UK has never had a written constitution and is moving into constitutional culture.”

Schauer came to the Kennedy School in 1990, and is affiliated with the Shorenstein Center of the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

Apart from being a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Schauer has also been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Though the Eastman Professors are required to give 24 student lectures at Oxford, Schauer’s tenure will not be limited to the classroom.

“In addition to teaching, I expect to do a fair amount of work on common law theory, and the university where [Jeremy] Bentham studied will be an ideal place to work.”

Schauer is currently completing a visiting professorship at the University of Chicago law school.

Of the 65 previous Eastman fellows, 13 were Nobel Prize winners. Schauer will be the third lawyer to hold the post, along with former U.S. Supreme Court Justice and former HLS professor Felix Frankfurter in 1933-34, and Eugene Rostow, the former dean of Yale Law School, in 1970-72.

The Eastman professorship was formed in 1929 in honor of George Eastman, the founder of the Eastman Kodak Company.