Ruggie moved to the United States to attend graduate school, earning a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley.

[4][5] He also taught at the University of California's Berkeley and San Diego campuses and directed the UC system-wide Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation.

A survey in Foreign Policy magazine named him as one of the 25 most influential international relations scholars in the United States and Canada.

[1] His book Just Business: Multinational Corporations and Human Rights has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish.

social science prize from the WZB Berlin Social Science Center; as well as awards from the American Bar Association and the Washington Foreign Law Society, the latter honoring "an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the development and application of international law."

He was on the Board of the Arabesque Group, an ESG data provider and asset manager, as well as on Unilever's Sustainability Advisory Council.