Bruce Ackerman
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bruce Arnold Ackerman (born August 19, 1943) is a famous constitutional law scholar in the United States. He is a Sterling Professor at Yale Law School and one of the most frequently cited legal academics in the country.
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[edit] Biography
Ackerman graduated from Bronx Science High School, received his B.A degree from Harvard University in 1964 and LL.B degree from Yale Law School in 1967. He clerked for U.S Court of Appeals Judge Henry J. Friendly from 1967 to 1968, and then for US. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan II, U.S. Supreme Court, from 1968 to 1969.
Ackerman joined the faculty of University of Pennsylvania in 1969. He was a Professor at Yale University from 1974 to 1982 and at Columbia University from 1982 to 1987. Since 1987 Ackerman has been the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale. He teaches classes at Yale on the concepts of justice and on his theories of constitutional transformation (i.e. the Constitution of the Founders was transformed by the Civil War/Reconstruction and the New Deal). His wife, Susan Rose-Ackerman, is also a professor at Yale Law School who teaches classes on administrative law. Their son, John Mill Ackerman, is also an academic who lives and works in Mexico.
[edit] Works
Bruce Ackerman is the author of fifteen books and nearly fifty articles. His interests cover constitutional theory, political philosophy, comparative law and politics, law and economics, American constitutional history, the environment, and social justice.
His major works include:
- Social Justice in the Liberal State, 1980
- We the People, Volume 1, Foundations, 1991, Harvard University Press
- Is NAFTA Constitutional?, with David Golove, 1995, Harvard University Press
- We the People, Volume 2, Transformations, 1998, Harvard University Press
- The Failure of the Founding Fathers, 2005, Harvard University Press
We the People: Foundations is best known for its forceful argument that the "switch in time," whereby a particular member of the U.S. Supreme Court changed his judicial philosophy to one that permitted much more of the New Deal legislation in response to the so called court-packing plan, is an example of political determination of constitutional meaning.
With Anne Alstott he wrote The Stakeholder Society (ISBN 0300078269) in 1999 which served as a basis for introduction of Child Trust Funds in the United Kingdom.[1]
