Bruce Ackerman

 ( American Scholars Of Constitutional Law ) 

Bruce Arnold Ackerman (born August 19, 1943) is an American legal scholar who serves as a Sterling Professor at Yale Law School. In 2010, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers. Ackerman was also identified as one of the top 50 thinkers of the COVID-19 era by Prospect.

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Early life and education Ackerman was born in New York City on August 19, 1943 to Jewish parents whose families had fled Eastern Europe in previous decades to escape antisemitism . "Biographical Overview: Bruce Ackerman", at Yale Law website He grew up in the Bronx, graduating from the Bronx High School of Science. He went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, from Harvard University in 1964, followed by a Bachelor of Laws (equivalent to a Juris Doctor) degree from Yale Law School in 1967.

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Career Ackerman clerked for U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Henry 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 Law School 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. He regards himself as a legal pragmatist.

He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1986. He is also a Commander of the Order of Merit of the French Republic.

Ackerman is listed as counsel in U.S. Army Captain Nathan Michael Smith's lawsuit against President Barack Obama. The lawsuit asserts five counts against the President: that Operation Inherent Resolve violates the War Powers Resolution, that the Constitution's Take Care Clause requires the President to publish a sustained legal justification of his actions, that the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists does not authorize the operation against ISIS, that the Iraq Resolution does not authorize the operation in Iraq, and that the Commander in Chief clause does not allow the President to authorize the operation. Captain Smith's attorneys allege he has standing to sue because he will be personally liable for any damages he inflicts in an illegal war. The White House responded that the lawsuit raises "legitimate questions". After the district court dismissed the lawsuit as a political question, Ackerman appealed.

In 2022, Ackerman co-authored a Politico article with Gerard Magliocca predicting that the 2024 United States presidential election would divide the country into Democratic states that disqualify Donald Trump from appearing on the ballot under the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution for the January 6 United States Capitol attack and Republican states which would not, potentially leading to a constitutional crisis in which no candidate wins a supermajority of votes in the United States Electoral College and in which the United States House of Representatives either nominates Trump as the winner despite losing the electoral vote or is completely incapable of resolving the issue through a contingent election as constitutionally required. This prediction failed to play out after the Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. Anderson that individual states could not rule on the eligibility of a candidate.

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Criticism of judicial review Sandrine Baume identified Bruce Ackerman as a leading critic of the "compatibility of judicial review with the very principles of democracy," in contrast to writers like John Hart Ely and Ronald Dworkin.Baume, Sandrine (2011). Hans Kelsen and the Case for Democracy, ECPR Press, pp. 53–54. For his position as documented by Baume, Ackerman was joined in his opinion about judicial review by Larry Kramer and Mark Tushnet as the main proponents of the idea that judicial review should be strongly limited and that the Constitution should be returned "to the people."Mark Tushnet. Taking the Constitution Away From the Courts (Princeton University Press 1999), pp. 1-11.

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Personal life Ackerman is married to Susan Rose-Ackerman, also a professor at Yale Law School, who teaches classes on administrative law. Their son, John M. Ackerman, also an academic, lives and works in Mexico. Their daughter, Sybil Ackerman-Munson, is an environmentalist in Portland, Oregon.

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Books He is the author of nineteen books and more than ninety articles. His interests cover constitutional theory, political philosophy, comparative law and politics, law and economics, American constitutional history, the environment, modern economy and social justice.

His works include:

• 1980: Social Justice in the Liberal State ()
• 1991: We the People, Volume 1, Foundations ()
• 1995: Is NAFTA Constitutional?, with David Golove ()
• 1998: We the People, Volume 2, Transformations ()
• 1999: The Stakeholder Society, with Anne Alstott ()
• 2002: Voting with Dollars, with Ian Ayres ()
• 2004: Deliberation Day, with James S. Fishkin ()
• 2005: The Failure of the Founding Fathers ()
• 2006: Before the Next Attack: Preserving Civil Liberties in an Age of Terrorism
• 2010: The Decline and Fall of the American Republic ()
• 2014: We the People, Volume 3: The Civil Rights Revolution ()
• 2018: Revolutionary Constitutions: Charismatic Leadership and the Rule of Law ()
• 2024: The Postmodern Predicament: Existential Challenges of the Twenty-First Century ()

We the People: Foundations is best known for its forceful argument that the "switch in time", whereby a particular member of the US 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. Ackerman delivered the 2006 Oliver Wendell Holmes Lectures at Harvard Law School. Bruce Ackerman, The Living Constitution, 120 Harv. L. Rev. 1737 (2007).

The Stakeholder Society served as a basis for the introduction of Child Trust Funds in the United Kingdom.For a more extended consideration of his contributions over the course of his career, go to Biographical Overview: "Bruce Ackerman" at law.yale.edu

University of Tehran held a conference in May 2019, about Revolutionary Constitutions: Charismatic Leadership and the Rule of Law with Ackerman and Nadia Maftouni as keynote speakers. Maftouni also wrote a review on the book which was published in The Socratic Inquiry newsletterNadia Maftouni, Book Review: Revolutionary Constitutions: Charismatic Leadership and the Rule of Law (Bruce Ackerman, Harvard University Press, 2019), The Socratic Inquiry Newsletter, 1 (3), 2-3 (2019). and an analytical paper about some parts of the book which was published in Journal of Contemporary Research on Islamic Revolution.Nadia Maftouni, Is the Iranian Revolution Sustaining a Constitutional System? The Assessment in Terms of Bruce Ackerman's Theory, Journal of Contemporary Research on Islamic Revolution, 2 (6), 85-98 (2020).

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See also

• Asset-based egalitarianism
• List of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States (Seat 9)

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External links

• Bruce Ackerman's Profile at Yale Law School

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