Biography

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, Professor Barnett has been a visiting professor at Penn, Northwestern and Harvard Law School.

Professor Barnett’s publications includes twelve books, more than one hundred articles and reviews, as well as numerous op-eds. His most recent book is Our Republican Constitution: Securing the Liberty and Sovereignty of We the People (HarperCollins, 2016). His other books include:

• Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty (Princeton, 2d ed. 2014)
• The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law (Oxford, 2d. ed 2014)
• A Conspiracy Against Obamacare: The Volokh Conspiracy and the Health Care Case (co-authored) (Palgrave, 2013)
• Contracts: Cases and Doctrine (Wolters Kluwer, 6th ed. 2016) 
• Constitutional Law: Cases in Context (Wolters Kluwer, 3rd ed. 2017) 
• The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law: Contracts (Oxford 2010)

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.  Recently, he appeared on PBS’s Constitution USA with Peter Sagal; and he portrayed a prosecutor in the 2010 science-fiction feature film, InAlienable.