Richard B. Bernstein
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (September 2007) |
- There is also a chemist called Richard B. Bernstein.
Richard B. Bernstein is a constitutional historian and author of several books on that subject. Born in Flushing, New York, on 24 May 1956, the oldest son of Fred Bernstein and Marilyn [Berman] Bernstein, Richard B. Bernstein was educated in the New York City public schools, graduating from Stuyvesant High School in 1973. He attended Amherst College, where he was graduated in 1977 with a b.a. magna cum laude in American Studies. While at Amherst, he was a research assistant to Henry Steele Commager. Bernstein then attended Harvard Law School from 1977 to 1980, graduating with a J.D. in November 1980.
After three years practicing law, Bernstein left the legal profession to return to the study of history, doing graduate work at New York University. From 1983 to the present he has been a member of the New York University Legal History Colloquium, and he has been active in the writing of legal and constitutional history and in activities to promote the historical profession.
From 1984 to 1987 he was research curator for the Constitution Bicentennial Project of The New York Public Library, working with Kym S. Rice under the supervision of Richard B. Morris, Gouverneur Morris Professor of History Emeritus at Columbia University. Among the products of this project was Bernstein's first book, Are We to Be a Nation? The Making of the Constitution, published by Harvard University Press and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in history. From 1987 to 1990 Bernstein was historian on the staff of the New York City Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution, and from 1989 to 1990 he was research director of the New York State Commission on the Bicentennial of the Constitution.
In the spring of 1988 Bernstein was a visiting part-time lecturer in history at Rutgers University -- Newark. In 1991, he was named an adjunct assistant professor of law at New York Law School, where has taught courses on American legal history and law and literature ever since. In 2007 he was named Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Law. In 1997-1998 he was the Daniel M. Lyons Visiting Professor of History at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.
Bernstein's most important books, in addition to Are We to Be a Nation?, are Amending America: If We Love the Constitution So Much, Why Do We Keep Trying to Change IT?, a history of the U.S. Constitution's amending process and the successful and unsuccessful attempts to amend the Constitution from 1789 through the early 1990s first published in 1993 by Times Books/Random House and reissued in paperback in 1995 by the University of Kansas Press; Thomas Jefferson and Bolling v. Bolling: Law and the Legal Profession in Pre-Revolutionary America, coedited with Barbara Wilcie Kern and Bernard Schwartz and copublished by the Henry E. Huntington Library and New York University School of Law in 1997; and Thomas Jefferson, published in 2003 by Oxford University Press. (A young-adult version, Thomas Jefferson and the Revolution of Ideas, appeared in 2004 in the series Oxford Portraits.) Amending America was nominated for the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in History and Thomas Jefferson was nominated for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in biography. Bernstein has also been nominated for the Bancroft and Francis Parkman Prizes for these books. Gordon S. Wood's review in The New York Times Book Review called his 2003 book Thomas Jefferson "the best short biography of Jefferson ever written." [1]
In addition, Bernstein has published "Charting the Bicentennial," a review essay that appeared in the Decembver 1987 Columbia Law Review; "The Sleeper Wakes: The History and Legacy of the Twenty-Seventh Amendment," a study that appeared in the December 1992 issue of the Fordham Law Review; and the historiographical introduction to Law as Culture and Culture as Law: Essays in Honor of John Philliup Reid, a volume published by Madison House in 2000 honoring the eminent legal history John Phillip Reid, the Russell Niles Professor Emeritus of Law at New York University School of Law.
The central features of Bernstein's work as a constitutional historian are his commitment to making the cutting-edge findings of historical scholarship accessible to a wider audience; his view that the U.S. Constitution can best be understood by situating it within the intellectual context of the trans-Atlantic Enlightenment; his skepticism about claims for strongly originalist interpretations of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights; and his emphasis on the Founding Fathers, both as individuals and as a group, as human beings with human strengths and human frailties, who expected those who came after them either to build on their achievements or to set them aside in favor of something better.
Bernstein's books-in-progress include The Founding Fathers Reconsidered; a concise life of John Adams modeled on his 2003 biography of Thomas Jefferson; a study of the First Congress as an experiment in government; and an examination of the place of scientific ideas and technological developments in American constitutional history.
From 1997 to 2004 Bernstein was co-editor of book reviews for H-LAW, the list-serv co-sponsored by H-NET (Humanities and Social Sciences Network On-Line) and the American Society for Legal HIstory. He is also a member of H-LAW's editorial board. For three years he served on the editorial board of Law and Social Inquiry, the journal of the American Bar Foundation. In 2004 he was elected to the board of directors of the American Society for Legal History for a three-year term.
In 1993, Bernstein changed his byline from Richard B. Bernstein to R. B. Bernstein to avoid confusion with the several other Richard Bernsteins active in journalism and law.
In November 2002, in addition to his scholarly activities, Bernstein became director of online operations at Heights Books, Inc., a leading used-bookstore in Brooklyn, New York.
