Walter Arnold Baker

Walter Arnold Baker (February 20, 1937 – May 24, 2010) was an American lawyer and politician who served in both houses of the Kentucky General Assembly, in the presidential administration of Ronald Reagan, and on the Kentucky Supreme Court. A graduate of Harvard Law School, Baker also served as a judge advocate general in the Kentucky Air National Guard for 20 years.

Baker's political career began with his election to the Kentucky House of Representatives in 1968, concurrent with the election of fellow Republican Louie B. Nunn as governor. Baker supported Nunn's efforts to raise the state sales tax to benefit education, the first of several education-related causes he would champion. In 1972, Baker was elected to the Kentucky Senate and was three times chosen as the Republican caucus chair. He resigned from the Senate in 1981 to take Reagan's appointment as assistant general counsel for International Affairs in the Department of Defense. He left that post in 1983 and was presented with the Department's Outstanding Public Service award. He narrowly lost a bid to return to his old Senate seat in 1984, but unseated the incumbent in 1989, spending the interim serving on the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence and Kentucky Advocates for Higher Education. In his second stint in the Senate, his major accomplishment was helping to write the 1990 Kentucky Education Reform Act.

In 1996, Governor Paul E. Patton appointed Baker to fill a vacancy on the Kentucky Supreme Court occasioned by the death of Justice Charles H. Reynolds, but he served only a few months before losing a special election for the remainder of Reynolds' term. In 1997, Patton appointed Baker to the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education, a post he held until 2008. Baker died of cancer on May 24, 2010.