Robert M. Ackerman
Dean and Professor of Law
E-mail: ackerman@wayne.edu
OFFICE HOURS: TBD
EDUCATION:
J.D., Harvard Law School
B.A., Colgate University
PROFILE:
Robert M. Ackerman, a Pennsylvania State University Dickinson School of Law professor and former dean of Willamette University College of Law, has been named the 10th dean of Wayne State University Law School, effective May 13, 2008. Professor Ackerman comes to Wayne State Law School from the Dickinson School of Law, where he taught torts, dispute resolution, conflict resolution theory, negotiation and mediation. He also served as chair of several committees and was the director of the Center for Dispute Resolution, the nation’s seventh-ranked law school dispute resolution program.
A cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, Ackerman served as dean and professor of law at Willamette University College of Law from July 1996 to May 1999. While dean, the law school experienced a 60 percent increase in financial aid to law students, a revitalization of the alumni organization and annual giving, enhanced visibility of the Center for Dispute Resolution and Law and Government program, and an increase in the diversity of the faculty and student body.
Ackerman has held academic appointments at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, the University of Vienna School of Law, the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine, and Leicester Polytechnic School of Law (now deMontfort University). He has also been employed by the Denver firm of Holme Roberts & Owen and the Harvard Prison Legal Assistance Project.
He has written extensively in the fields of torts, dispute resolution, communitarian theory and civic responsibility, and his scholarship has appeared in a wide variety of high profile publications. His recent essay, "Taking Responsibility," was a winner of the international Communitarian Essay Contest and was published in the German social science journal Leviathan. His co-authored book (with Robert F. Cochran Jr.) titled “Law and Community: The Case of Torts,” was published early in 2004.
Ackerman is an active participant in professional groups related to conflict resolution, and recently completed a term as chair of the AALS Section on Law and Communitarian Studies. A founding member of Mediators Beyond Borders, he has been working on development projects in Tanzania with Penn State's InterInstitutional Consortium for Indigenous Knowledge.
Selected Publications:
“Verantwortung ubernehmen” Leviathan, 2007 (German translation of “Taking Responsibility”).
“Vanishing Trial, Vanishing Community?” Journal of Dispute Resolution, 2006.
“The September 11 Victim Compensation Fund: An Administrative Response to National Tragedy,” Harvard Negotiation Law Review, 2005.
Law and Community: The Case of Torts, with Robert F. Cochran Jr., Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.
"Disputing Together: Conflict Resolution and the Search for Community," Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution, 2002.
“Tort Law and Federalism: Whatever Happened to Devolution?” Yale Law and Policy Review, Yale Journal on Regulation (Joint Symposium Issue), 1996.
“Tort Law and Communitarianism: Where Rights Meet Responsibilities," originally published in Wake Forest Law Review, 1995, revised and republished in To Promote The General Welfare: A Communitarian Legal Reader 1999.
“Defamation and Alternative Dispute Resolution: Healing the Sting,” Missouri Journal of Dispute Resolution, 1986.
“The Seat Belt Defense Reconsidered: A Return to Accountability in Tort Law?” New Mexico Law Review, 1986.
