Bruce Ackerman

Bruce Arnold Ackerman (born August 19, 1943) is an American legal scholar who serves as a Sterling Professor at Yale Law School.

Ackerman was born on August 19, 1943.

He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science and received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard University in 1964 as well as a Bachelor of Laws degree from Yale Law School in 1967.

He 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.

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.

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.

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."

He 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, modern economy and social justice.

His works include:

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.

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 Ackerman-Munson is an environmentalist in Portland, Oregon.

Ackerman delivered the 2006 Oliver Wendell Holmes Lectures at Harvard Law School.

The Stakeholder Society served as a basis for the introduction of Child Trust Funds in the United Kingdom.

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

University of Tehran held a conference in May 2019, about Revolutionary Constitutions: Charismatic Leadership and the Rule of Law with Ackerman and Maftouni as keynote speakers.

Maftouni also wrote a review on the book which was published in The Socratic Inquiry newsletter and an analytical paper about some parts of the book which was published in Journal of Contemporary Research on Islamic Revolution.

Ackerman was also among the unranked bottom 40 in the 2020 Prospect list of the top 50 thinkers for the COVID-19 era.