Bruce Ackerman

Bruce Arnold Ackerman (born August 19, 1943) is an American constitutional law scholar. He is a Sterling Professor at Yale Law School and one of the most frequently cited legal academics in the United States.^{[citation needed]}

In 2010, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers.^[1]

Biography

Ackerman graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, received a B.A degree from Harvard University in 1964 and an 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 U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan II 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 M. Ackerman, is also an academic who lives and works in Mexico. Their daughter, Sybil R. Ackerman, is an environmental advocate in Portland, Oregon. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1986.^[2]

Ackerman's criticism of judicial review

Jeremy Waldron (photo) and Bruce Ackerman have taken an opposing position to Dworkin's strong defense of the compatibility of judicial review and the principles of democracy.

In her recent book on Hans Kelsen, Sandrine Baume^[3] identified Bruce Ackerman and Jeremy Waldron as leading critics of the "compatibility of judicial review with the very principles of democracy." Baume identified John Hart Ely alongside Dworkin as the foremost defenders of this principle in recent years, while the opposition to this principle of "compatibility" were identified as Bruce Ackerman^[4] and Jeremy Waldron.^[5] In contrast to Ackerman, Dworkin was a long-time advocate of the principle of the moral reading of the Constitution whose lines of support he sees as strongly associated with enhanced versions of judicial review in the federal government.

Works

Bruce Ackerman is the author of fifteen books and more than eighty 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
• Ackerman, Bruce; Ayres, Ian (2002). Voting with Dollars. Yale U. Pr. ISBN 0300092628. 
• The Failure of the Founding Fathers, 2005, Harvard University Press
• We the People, Volume 3: The Civil Rights Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014)

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.

His current (2010) book is The Decline and Fall of the American Republic. ISBN 978-0-674-05703-6

See also

• Asset-based egalitarianism

References

External links

• Bruce Ackerman's Profile at Yale Law School