Prof.
A native of Owensboro, Kentucky, Professor Denning earned his undergraduate degree, magna cum laude, from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and his law degree, magna cum laude, from the University of Tennessee School of Law. He then spent two years in the health law group at Baker, Donelson, Bearman and Caldwell, P.C. in Memphis.
Opportunity led Professor Denning north in 1997 to Yale Law School, where he took a position as a research associate and Senior Fellow. He earned an LL.M. degree from Yale in 1999. From 1999-2003, he taught at the Southern Illinois University School of Law before joining the Cumberland faculty. During the summers, he has regularly taught constitutional law at the University of Tennessee College of Law and in Cumberland’s Study Abroad Program at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University. He was named Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Cumberland in 2014.
Professor Denning writes in the area of constitutional law; specifically, he has written on the Commerce Clause and the dormant commerce clause; judicial and executive branch appointments; the constitutional amendment process; foreign affairs and the Constitution; and the Second Amendment. He collaborated with Boris I. Bittker, Late Sterling Professor Emeritus at Yale, on Bittker on the Regulation of Interstate Commerce and Foreign Commerce (Aspen Publishing, 1999), and is the sole author of the second edition. In 2016, he published Guns and the Law: Cases, Materials, and Explanation (with Andrew Jay McClurg), a casebook published by Carolina Academic Press that covers various aspects of the legal regulation of firearms, from the Second Amendment to the laws governing the use of deadly force.
Most recently, he has published the sixth edition of American Constitutional Law: Powers and Liberties, for which he is the successor author to the late Calvin Massey. He also recently combined two volumes of the previously-published The Glannon Guide to Constitutional Law, publishing a third edition of The Glannon Guide to Constitutional Law: Powers and Liberties. All are published by Aspen Publishing. He also wrote Developing Professional Skills: Constitutional Law, an innovative text that furnishes materials allowing students to hone their drafting, analysis, and negotiation skills through constitutional law problems. In addition, he is the co-author of Becoming a Law Professor: A Candidate’s Guide, a comprehensive guide for the aspiring legal academic.
Professor Denning’s other writings have been published in Foreign Affairs, Constitutional Commentary, the Northwestern University Law Review, the William and Mary Law Review, the Minnesota Law Review, the American Journal of International Law, the Wisconsin Law Review, the Tulane Law Review, and Law and Contemporary Problems, among other journals and periodicals. He was the recipient of the 2008 Harvey S. Jackson Excellence in Teaching Award for upper-level classes and of the Lightfoot, Franklin & White Award for Faculty Scholarship, which he won in 2012, 2016, and again in 2019.
