Author Archive | Randy Barnett

I was supremely honored to be asked by SCOTUSBlog to sit for an interview as part of its new SCOTUSblog “On Camera” interview series. Others who have been interviewed to date are Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, Burt Neuborne, Goeffrey Stone, Adam Liptak, Linda Greenhouse, Nina Totenberg, and David Porter.  The questioning was wide-ranging and very well-informed, […]

The updated and expanded edition of my book Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty, published by Princeton University Press, is now for sale on Amazon.com for $18.65.  The new edition features a 60-page Afterword on “Things I have Learned Since the First Edition,” which is quite a lot.   Here are the topic […]

Todd makes an interesting suggestion in light of Peter Ferrara’s assessment (in The Anti-Cuccinelli Axis) of the Cuccinelli campaign: The Libertarian Party should emulate the Conservative Part in New York, and offer to endorse the preferable of the Republican or Democratic candidate. Make the major party candidate vie for the support of libertarians (though this […]

Is Obamacare enforced by a tax or a penalty? In the Supreme Court, the Obama Administration claimed that the “penalty” enforcing the individual responsibility requirement was a tax.  Proposals by anxious Democrat Senators, many in vulnerable seats, to delay the enforcement of the Affordable Care Act presents a golden opportunity for the government to finally […]

I wish to welcome Josh Blackman as a guest blogger this week Josh is an Assistant Professor of Law at the South Texas College of Law, and author of Unprecedented: The Constitutional Challenge to Obamacare.  It is a marvelous book describing the constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act based on extensive interviews with all the major players. […]

There’s been lots of excellent blogging on the subject of whether Senator Ted Cruz was a “natural born citizen” of the United States and therefore eligible to be President.  I won’t summarize it here, but recommend Mike Ramsey’s two posts on here and here on The Originalism Blog, Garrett Epps’s post here on Atlantic.com, Sandy Levinson’s post here on Balkinization, and Steven Lubet’s here on […]

In the comments on my blog post praising the originalist analysis of the Fourth Amendment by Professor Donald Dripps, some commentators raised the predicable canard that one must be a trained historian to identify the original meaning of the Constitution.  This is actually an interesting question as it goes to the heart of both the […]

University of San Diego law professor Donald A. Dripps has an important new article in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology: “Dearest Property”: Digital Evidence and the History of Private “Papers” as Special Objects of Search and Seizure (103 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 49 (2013)).  (H/T Mike Ramsey at The Originalism Blog).  In […]

Yesterday, Jim Harper of the Cato Institute and I filed an amicus brief in support of  The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)’s challenge to the constitutionality of the NSA’s blanket seizures of private phone records.  Here is the summary from the Cato website: The National Security Agency’s collection of every American’s telephone dialing information is […]

Israeli pianist Astrith Baltsan explains the music of George Gershwin before a performance of Rhapsody in Blue with the Israel Philharmonic in a 2001 live broadcast on Israel TV. Which brought to mind one of the all-time-great opening sequences of a major motion picture. The only one I can think of that comes close to […]

Simon Lazarus of the Constitution Accountability Center has a provocative essay that the New Republic has entitled “Alito Shrugged: Libertarianism has won over the Supreme Court conservatives.”  (Whoever writes their urls gave it the more tendentious title, “supreme-court-libertarianism-ron-pauls-bench”)  Here’s a taste: On high profile issues, the conservative bloc’s five members—Chief Justice Roberts and Associate Justices Antonin […]

I regret that I overlooked my friend Richard Epstein’s thoughtful reply on Ricochet to my Wall Street Journal op-ed on the blanket seizures of data by the National Security Agency and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the constitutionality of which has apparently been authorized in secret opinions issued by the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Court: National […]

Volokh Conspiracy readers who are heading off to law school in the Fall might benefit from a short book on contract law I wrote recently as part of a series called, the Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law.  It is written to be accessible to students and to discuss most of the “classic” cases one is […]

In response to my post yesterday, Corey Robin has a blog post on Crooked Timber based on a good faith, but uncharitable misreading of this prefatory sentence on my piece. I wish to add a few additional considerations that I have become aware of over the past several years as I have researched and written about “abolitionist […]

Seth Barrett Tillman writes in to add these points to our discussion of secession and the Confederacy. First, we do not have good evidence that even a majority of the adult white males in each rebel state supported secession at the time purported state conventions issued their ordinances of secession. The secession conventions were hardly […]