Description: Integrating themes from American history, political science, and philosophy, We the People confronts popular sovereignty in America. Rejecting arguments of judicial activists, proceduralists, and neoconservatives, Ackerman's new model of judicial interpretation synthesizes the constitutional contributions of many generations into a coherent whole.
Brief description: Bruce Ackerman is Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University and the award-winning author of eighteen books, including Social Justice in the Liberal State and his multivolume constitutional history We the People. His book The Stakeholder Society (written with Anne Alstott) served as a basis for Tony Blair's introduction of child investment accounts in the United Kingdom. He contributes frequently to the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. Ackerman is a member of the American Law Institute and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the recipient of the American Philosophical Society's Henry M. Phillips Prize for lifetime achievement in jurisprudence.
Review Quotes: The most important project now underway in the entire field of constitutional theory...to be published in this decade...indeed, perhaps in the past half-century... Ackerman posits a complex process of 'Publian politics' where 'We the People' become authorized to change the Constitution without ever invoking the procedures laid out in Article V... We the People can also lay claim to being the most significant work in 'constructive' American political thought since Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America, published some 35 years ago... Ackerman is reopening the question about 'American exceptionalism' and arguing, with extraordinary vigor, that American political development is indeed importantly different from European and other models.--Sanford Levinson, University of Texas School of Law