[4] Gerhardt was born in 1956 in Madison, Wisconsin, and grew up in Mobile, Alabama, where he attended UMS-Wright and was ranked second in the state in junior tennis.
[10] His most recent book is The Forgotten Presidents: Their Untold Constitutional Legacy, published in April 2013 by Oxford University Press.
[11] Gerhardt has assisted members of Congress and the White House on a range of various constitutional issues, beginning with drafting the judicial selection policy for the transition of Bill Clinton into office.
[13] Also, he was one of only two legal scholars to testify against the constitutionality of the Line Item Veto Act of 1996, which the Supreme Court struck down in Clinton v. City of New York.
[18] Gerhardt then served as a witness in the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearings on the nomination of Samuel Alito, to become an associate justice of the Supreme Court.
[19] Along with Professor Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School, he is the only legal scholar to have been invited to testify in both the 1998 impeachment proceedings against President Clinton and the confirmation hearings for Associate Justice Alito.
He also acted as Special Counsel to Senator Patrick Leahy regarding the nominations of Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court of the United States.
[22] Gerhardt is interviewed frequently by many news outlets, including National Public Radio,[23] as an expert on constitutional law and issues.