Robert M. Ackerman recently returned to full-time teaching and scholarship after serving almost five years as dean at Wayne Law. As dean, he led the Law School in the development of a new Environmental Law Clinic, an Asylum and Immigration Law Clinic, and a Program for International Legal Studies. He secured funding for Public Interest Law Fellowships, and assisted in strengthening the Law School's dynamic faculty by hiring a number of outstanding legal scholars and practitioners. In October 2011, Ackerman welcomed more than 600 guests to campus for the dedication of the Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights, a project he and a number of Wayne Law faculty members, alumni and friends helped to make a reality. Ackerman teaches courses in torts and dispute resolution. He serves on Labor@Wayne's internal advisory board and as Wayne State University's faculty athletic representative. Previously, he served on the Institute of Continuing Legal Education's executive committee, chairing that committee from 2009-2010. Prior to coming to Wayne Law, Ackerman served as a professor at Penn State University's Dickinson School of Law, where he taught torts, dispute resolution, conflict resolution theory, negotiation and mediation. He also served as director of the Center for Dispute Resolution, at the time the nation's seventh-ranked law school dispute resolution program. Ackerman, a cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School and magna cum laude graduate of Colgate University, served as dean and professor of law at Willamette University College of Law from July 1996 to May 1999. While he was 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 lectured at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, the University of Vienna School of Law, the Penn 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 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.), Law and Community: The Case of Torts, was published early in 2004. Ackerman is an active participant in professional groups related to conflict resolution. He is a founding member of Mediators Beyond Borders, and has worked on development projects in Tanzania with Penn State's InterInstitutional Consortium for Indigenous Knowledge. He also has served as chair of the AALS Section on Law and Communitarian Studies and is chair-elect of the AALS Section on Socioeconomics.

Professor Robert M. Ackerman will be a visiting professor at the College of Law, National Taiwan University, from May to June in 2017. During the visit, he will teach intense course on Anglo-American Tort Law.