Georgetown Law

Randy E. Barnett is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theory at the Georgetown University Law Center, where he teaches constitutional law and contracts, and is Director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. 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. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Constitutional Studies and the Bradley Prize, Professor Barnett has been a visiting professor at Penn, Northwestern and Harvard Law School.

Professor Barnett’s publications includes eleven books, more than one hundred articles and reviews, as well as numerous op-eds. His most recent book is An Introduction to Constitutional Law: 100 Supreme Court Cases Everyone Should Know (2019) (with Josh Blackman). His other books on the Constitution are Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty (2^nd ed. 2013), The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law (2^nd ed. 2014), Our Republican Constitution: Securing the Liberty and Sovereignty of We the People (2016), and Constitutional Law: Cases in Context (3^rd ed. 2018) (with Josh Blackman). His books on Contracts are The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law: Contracts (2010), Contracts: Cases and Doctrine (6^th ed. 2016) (with Nate Oman).

In 2004, he argued the medical marijuana case of Gonzalez v. Raich before the U.S. Supreme Court. 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’s appeared in numerous documentaries, including PBS’s Constitution USA with Peter Sagal and A More or Less Perfect Union with Judge Douglas Ginsburg; and he portrayed a prosecutor in the 2010 science-fiction feature film, InAlienable: The Movie. He blogs on the Volokh Conspiracy.