Author Archive | Randy Barnett

Make sure you keep watching:

January 19th was the 200th anniversary of the birthday of Lysander Spooner, lawyer, abolitionist, entrepreneur, legal theorist and scholar. You can read a short bio and description of his approach to constitutional interpretation here. Professor Helen Knowles of SUNY Oswego and Spooner scholar (yes there are at least 2) baked the following cake in his […]

It turns out that Fox’s “24” was proposed as a series in 1994. The pilot episode was recently bootlegged and released on line.

Yesterday I engaged in an email interview with a reporter from the AP, who today in this story inaccurately attributes the following view to me: Randy Barnett, law professor at Georgetown University, agreed that the argument is strained, and said that if the high court accepts the notion that the right to bear arms is […]

In light of the question presented in The District of Columbia v. Heller now pending in the Supreme Court, I have updated the SSSN version of my article, Was the Right to Keep and Bear Arms Conditioned on Service in an Organized Militia?, so you can now download the final version as it appeared in […]

The film in which I appear as an assistant prosecutor has been released by Renegade Studios. You can view it on line for $2.99 and see a free trailer for the movie (including a brief glimpse of me in the courtroom being seated at counsel table) here. [If the audio of the trailer is choppy, […]

Journeyman is a rare network television show that I have really enjoyed. It is a clever sci-fi drama about a San Francisco newspaper journalist who is sent back in time involuntarily to intervene in someone’s life by altering the past and changing the present. Why this is happening to him is one of these gradually […]

Here is an interesting photo from the Fifth Annual Blogger Costume Party on Alan K. Henderson’s Weblog. For costumed versions of Glenn Reynolds, Ann Althouse, Walter Olson and Steve Bainbridge, click here.

Larry Solum has an important new post on the New Originalism responding to Brian Leiter and my recent posts on the subject. Semantic and Normative Originalism: Comments on Brian Leiter’s “Justifying Originalism” It is far too long and complex to summarize here, and I cannot even find a single excerpt that captures its entire analysis. […]

A few weeks ago, I spoke on “The New Originalism” at a colloquium sponsored by the Philosophy Department at the University of Texas. Brian Leiter was there and he now has posted Justifying Originalism in which he thoughtfully and respectfully comments on my talk. After a nice summary of my oral presentation, he offers this […]

I have not been able to blog lately due to travel and writing commitments, which is too bad because if I could blog, I would blog about these exchanges between Matthew Franck and Jack Balkin on whether Balkin is a faux originalist and Roger Pilon on whether the fundamental rights jurisprudence is a scam. (For […]

I just finished watching the new series Mad Men on AMC — a show about advertising executives on Madison Avenue in 1960. It is well worth trying. Well written, gorgeously photographed, paced and scored in the style of cinema rather than TV. No doubt, the American Movie Channel required this for their first network series. […]

In my post below I describe the libertarian take on war to be undertheorized. Two VC readers independently pointed me to two different articles by libertarians in a symposium on “War and Liberty,” published in The Reason Papers. Though quite different from each other, both offer the type of effort I was calling for. I […]

I hesitated writing my WSJ op-ed, Libertarians and the War because I knew it would provoke a strong reaction from antiwar libertarians, many of whom have been my friends and colleagues for a very long time. That it did. Therefore, I am grateful for the many emails and blog posts thanking me for pointing out […]