Randy Barnett

Randy Evan Barnett (born February 5, 1952) is an American legal scholar.

He serves as the Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown University, where he teaches constitutional law and contracts, and is the director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution.

After graduating from Northwestern University and Harvard Law School, Barnett tried felony cases as a prosecutor in the Cook County State's Attorney's Office in Chicago.

A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Constitutional Studies and the Bradley Prize, Barnett has been a visiting professor at Penn, Northwestern and Harvard Law School.

Randy Barnett was born on February 5, 1952, in Chicago, Illinois.

After high school, he attended Northwestern University, graduating in 1974 with a B.A. in philosophy.

He then studied law at Harvard Law School, graduating with a J.D. in 1977.

After law school, Barnett returned to Chicago and worked as an Illinois state prosecutor for Cook County, Illinois.

Barnett spent the 1981–82 academic year as a research fellow at the University of Chicago Law School, then, in the fall of 1982, began his academic career as an assistant professor of law at the Chicago-Kent College of Law.

In 1993, Barnett was hired as a professor of law at the Boston University School of Law.

In 2003, Barnett wrote:

In 2004, Barnett argued the medical marijuana case of Gonzalez v. Raich before the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 2006, Barnett left Boston and began teaching at the Georgetown University Law Center, where he currently remains.

In The Structure of Liberty, Barnett offers a libertarian theory of law and politics.

Barnett calls his theory "the liberal conception of justice" and emphasizes the relationship between legal libertarianism and classical liberalism.

He argues private adjudication and enforcement of law, with market forces eliminating inefficiencies and inequities, to be the only legal system that can provide adequate solutions to the problems of interest, power, and knowledge.

He discusses theories of constitutional legitimacy and methods of constitutional interpretation in Restoring the Lost Constitution.

There have been several criticisms and reviews of his theory, including Stephan Kinsella, Richard Epstein,

David N. Mayer,

Lawrence B. Solum and John K. Palchak and Stanley T. Leung.

Barnett was also lead lawyer for the plaintiffs in Ashcroft v. Raich (later Gonzales v. Raich), which he won before the Ninth Circuit, which ruled that federal action against legal marijuana patients violated the Commerce Clause.

Barnett's side, however, lost on appeal at the Supreme Court, which ruled that Congress had the power to enforce federal

marijuana prohibition in states that had legalized medical marijuana.

He was also involved in the famous Affordable Care Act case National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius.

Barnett has also done work on the theory of the United States Constitution, culminating in his books Restoring the Lost Constitution and Our Republican Constitution.

He argues for an originalist theory of constitutional interpretation and for constitutional construction based on a presumption of liberty, not popular sovereignty.

Barnett also focuses on the history and original meaning of the Second and Ninth Amendments to the United States Constitution.

He has advanced the Standard Model interpretation that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to bear arms, subject to federal regulation under Congress's power to organize the militia in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.

Barnett is a proponent of the view that the Ninth Amendment's rights "retained by the people" should be vigorously enforced by the federal judiciary.

In a 2006 article, Barnett wrote:

"The purpose of the Ninth Amendment was to ensure that all [enumerated and unenumerated] individual natural rights had the same stature and force after some of them were enumerated as they had before; and its existence argued against a latitudinarian interpretation of federal powers."

Regarding what stature and force natural rights had before some of them were enumerated, Barnett says that federal courts did not have authority to enforce such rights against the states.

He wrote in the same 2006 article:

"It was only with passage of the Fourteenth Amendment ... that the federal government obtained any jurisdiction to protect the unenumerated retained natural rights of the people from infringement by state governments."

A related issue is whether the original unamended Constitution gave federal courts authority to enforce unenumerated natural rights against congressional regulation of the federal district.

Barnett has indicated that federal courts had such authority and that enumerated rights "had the same stature and force" in the district even before they were enumerated.

He has indicated that the case of Bolling v. Sharpe (dealing with integration of public schools in the District of Columbia) is hard to justify textually from the Constitution, and if it were to be overturned, Congress would create more laws desegregating the district, which would be justified in his view of the Constitution.

The question of what constitutional rights citizens possessed in the federal district has ramifications for the meaning of the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

In 2012, he was one of the lawyers representing the National Federation of Independent Business in its constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act in NFIB v. Sebelius.

He blogs on the Volokh Conspiracy.