Walter Berns

Walter Fred Berns Jr. (May 3, 1919 – January 10, 2015) was an American constitutional law and political philosophy professor. He was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor emeritus at Georgetown University. Berns was raised in Chicago and attended Reed College and the University of Iowa. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. After the war, he earned his Ph.D. under Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago. Berns taught at Louisiana State University, Yale University, and Cornell University, where he chaired the Department of Government. He was involved in debates during the 1969 campus takeover and subsequently resigned. He then taught at the University of Toronto before moving to Washington, D.C., to teach at Georgetown and conduct research at AEI. His research interests included the U.S. Constitution, political philosophy, patriotism, freedom of speech, and the death penalty. He received the National Humanities Medal in 2005. Berns married Irene Lyons in 1951 and died in 2015 at the age of 95.