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, 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 served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Cumberland from 2014-2020.

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 Law and  Business 1999), and was 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 seventh 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 Constitution Law, publishing a fourth 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 soup-to-nuts 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. In 2006, he was elected to the American Law Institute.  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, 2019, 2021, and again in 2023.  He is also the 2022-2023 recipient of the Thomas W. Woolley Scholarly Achievement Award, a university-wide award for scholarly achievement.  In 2021, he was named in a University of Chicago Law Review article as one of the 20 most-cited young legal scholars in the country.

His latest book is To Trust the People at Arms: The Supreme Court and the Second Amendment, which he co-authored with Robert J. Cottrol of George Washinton University School of Law.  The book was named the 2025 recipient of the Thomas M. Cooley Book Prize awarded by the Georgetown Law School’s Center for the Constitution.

Teaching & Research Interests

Constitutional Law and the United States Supreme Court

Degrees and Certifications

• LLM, Yale Law School
• JD, magna cum laude, University of Tennessee School of Law
• BA, magna cum laude, University of the South

Recent Publications and Works-in-Progress

• The Glannon Guide to Constitutional Law (4th ed. 2025).

• To Trust the People with Arms: The Supreme Court and the Second Amendment (University Press of Kansas) (2023) (winner of the 2025 Thomas M. Cooley Book Award from the Georgetown Law School’s Center for the Study of the Constitution) (with Robert J. Cottrol).

• American Constitutional Law: Powers and Liberties (7th ed. 2023) (with the late Calvin Massey).

• Trouble’s Bruen: The Lower Courts Respond, 108 Minn. L. Rev. 3187 (2024) (with Glenn H. Reynolds).

• Privacy and Autonomy Post-Dobbs, 93 Miss. L. Rev. 1029 (2024).

• Retconning Heller: Five Takes on New York Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, 65 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 79 (2023) (with Glenn H. Reynolds).

• National Pork Producers Council v. Ross: Extraterritoriality is Dead, Long Live the Dormant Commerce Clause, 2023 CATO Sup. Ct. Rev. 23.*

• Ipse Dixits, Bootstraps, and Constitutional Doctrine, 74 Baylor L. Rev. 555 (2022).