Randy E. Barnett

Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theory, the Georgetown University Law Center

Randy E. Barnett is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theory at the Georgetown University Law Center, where he teaches constitutional law and contracts. After graduating from Northwestern University and Harvard Law School, he tried many felony cases as a prosecutor in the Cook County States’ Attorney’s Office in Chicago. He has been a visiting professor at Northwestern and Harvard Law School. In 2008, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Constitutional Studies.

Professor Barnett’s publications includes more than one hundred articles and reviews, as well as nine books, including Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty (Princeton, 2005), Constitutional Law: Cases in Context (Aspen, 2008), Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law: Contracts (Oxford 2010) and Contracts: Cases and Doctrine (Aspen, 4th ed. 2008). His book,The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law (Oxford, 1998) was published in Japanese.

In 2004, Professor Barnett argued the medical marijuana case of Gonzalez v. Raich before the U.S. Supreme Court. He delivered the Kobe 2000 lectures in jurisprudence at the University of Tokyo and Doshisha University in Kyoto. He is frequently a guest on such programs as the CBS Evening News, The NBC Nightly News, The Glenn Beck Show (FNC), Parker Spitzer(CNN), and the Ricki Lake Show. His opinion pieces appear regularly in such publications as The Wall Street Journal.

In 2007, Professor Barnett was featured in the documentaries, The Trials of Law School and In Search of the Second Amendment. He also portrayed an assistant prosecutor in the independent film InAlienable, released in 2010, which stars Richard Hatch, Courtney Peldon, Marina Sirtis, Erick Avari, and Walter Koenig.

Randy E. Barnett Contributions

February 13, 2013
  • Taxes
  • Environment & Energy
  • Education
  • Health Care
  • FIRE
  • Economy
  • Government Spending
November 1, 1992
  • Government & Liberty
  • Criminal Justice

What's New


Heartland Newsletters

The Heartland Institute offers free email subscriptions to all of its newsletters and monthly public policy newspapers.