Post Date: September 29, 2006
Renowned constitutional law Professor Bruce Ackerman delivered the 2006 Harvard Law School Oliver Wendell Holmes Lecture this year. In his three-part series, entitled “The Living Constitution,” which began on Tuesday, October 3, and continued through Thursday, October 5, professor Ackerman examined various aspects of the US constitution.
A recipient of the American Philosophical Society’s Henry Phillips Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Jurisprudence, professor Ackerman’s fields of study cover political philosophy, comparative law and politics, taxation and welfare, environmental law, law and economics and property. An expert on American constitutional law, Ackerman has penned such publications as “We the People, vol. 1 and 2,” “The Failure of the Founding Fathers,” and “America on the Brink,” currently in progress.
Ackerman, a 1964 graduate of Harvard College, received his LL.B from Yale Law School in 1967. After clerkships for both the U.S Court of Appeals Judge Henry J. Friendly and Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan II, Ackerman joined the University of Pennsylvania faculty before becoming a professor at both Yale and Columbia law schools. Currently the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale, a position he has held since 1987, he teaches classes on the concepts of justice and theories of constitutional transformation.
Established in 1954 as a result of the bequest of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1861, the Holmes Lecture is the most prestigious talk given at the law school. Past lecturers have included Judge Learned Hand, Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and Stephen Breyer, Professor Ronald Dworkin and Judge Richard Posner. The most recent Holmes Lecturer was current University of Chicago Professor Cass Sunstein in 2003.
Holmes Lecture 2006 Schedule