Author Archive | Randy Barnett

Obama may announce running mate later today WASHINGTON – Presidential candidate Barack Obama said Friday the running mate he has chosen — but has not yet announced — had to meet three standards to join the Democratic ticket: Prepared to be president, able to help him govern and willing to challenge his thinking. Those criteria […]

A very interesting post today by Tim Lynch on Cato @ Liberty on a recent jury trial in a drug case: It was supposed to be just another federal drug prosecution. The federal prosecutors introduced evidence that the man on trial was involved in the black market drug trade. The defense attorney said the government […]

I have seen the musical Mamma Mia three times, twice in Boston and once on Broadway. So obviously I like the play. Why? Well for one thing I like the ABBA songs, and always have, despite the more refined taste of my 1970s peers who preferred the melodious sounds of Neil Young, Van Morrison, and […]

In editing Lysander Spooner’s 1886 A Letter to Grover Cleveland for a conference I am organizing, I happened upon the following colorful observation I thought others might enjoy: To say, as the advocates of our government do, that a man must give up some of his natural rights, to a government, in order to have […]

Ever watched a film that was “based on a true story” and wonder how much of the story was really true? I was watching the surprisingly moving Hollywoodland about the death of George Reeves, TV’s Superman, and started wondering about the truth of the tale. A Google search quickly turned up the Reel Faces webpage […]

As Jim noted below, the New York Times ran a story today on Barack Obama’s teaching experience at the University of Chicago Law School called Teaching Law, Testing Ideas, Obama Stood Apart (registration probably required). The Caucus: The New York Times Political Blog, is making the materials available for readers to examine for themselves, along […]

Jack Balkin and Larry Solum are having a very important exchange on the originalist methodology employed by Justice Scalia in Heller. (For Jack’s post click here for Larry’s click here, here, & here) This involves the crucial, and widely unappreciated, distinction between constitutional interpretation and constitutional construction, a distinction first brought to the fore in […]

In editing Heller for the supplement to my new casebook, Constitutional Law: Cases in Context (Aspen 2008), I noticed a reference to the great Lysander Spooner in Justice Scalia’s opinion that I had previously overlooked. The following passage is worth reading in its entirety due to its relevance to the original meaning of the Privileges […]

Kurt Lash has composed the following reply to my post on Justice Scalia’s brief reference to the Ninth Amendment in Heller, which I post here with pleasure: I want to thank Randy Barnett and the folks at The Volokh Conspiracy for allowing me to respond to Professor Barnett’s post on Heller and Justice Scalia’s reference […]

Buried in Justice Scalia’s exegesis on the Second Amendment is a wonderful gift to those of us who study and care about the Ninth Amendment: The unamended Constitution and the Bill of Rights use the phrase “right of the people” two other times, in the First Amendment’s Assembly-and-Petition Clause and in the Fourth Amendment’s Search-and-Seizure […]

Perhaps the question most commonly asked by reporters about yesterday’s decision in Heller, is how it will affect the constitutionality of other gun laws. I believe Justice Scalia signaled that regulations short of a ban should be scrutinized the way we do “time, place, and manner” regulations of speech when he equated the Second Amendment […]

Larry Lessig has a blog post on what he calls, The Kozinski Mess, by which he means “the total inability of the media — including we, the media, bloggers — to get the basic facts right, and keep the reality in perspective. The real story here is how easily we let such a baseless smear […]

On Legal Theory Blog, Larry Solum is on a roll. He has an interesting take on Josh Wright’s blog post at TRUTH ON THE MARKET on the future of law and economics. Here is a taste of Wright: One consequence of the increase in formal theory and empirical work is increased specialization in economics, and […]

Originalist theory has made great strides in recent years. Among the most insightful of these theorists is Larry Solum, whose Legal Theory Blog is a must read for law professors and academically inclined law students. Solum’s important new paper, Semantic Originalism, is the most systematic and careful explication of originalist methodology ever presented. Anyone who […]

I missed this story from the April 1st issue of the Harvard Law Record (hat tip: Leiter’s Law School Reports): Harvard Law School’s communications office announced today that HLS has hired every law professor in the country, solidifying its position as the preeminent law school in America. Dean Elena Kagan said that she got the […]