Author Archive | Randy Barnett

My colleague Ilya Somin and I last year published a review essay in the Yale Law Journal entitled Judicial Power and Civil Rights Reconsidered, a review of Michael Klarman’s From Jim Crow to Civil Rights. When first posted on SSRN, the review received over 100 downloads. However, the YLJ objected to us posting the piece […]

Gary Becker: “Open immigration to America worked well during the 19th century because the government did very little for immigrants and their families. How immigrants voted after becoming citizens also mattered little because government decisions were not so important. With the growth of government during the past half century, neither of these conditions continues to […]

I am old enough to remember when a very young Tom Palmer used to travel behind the Iron Curtain on behalf of the Cato Institute to plant seeds of liberty in the Eastern block countries. Since the fall of Saddam, he has been doing the same thing under even more dangerous conditions in Iraq, making […]

After “The Shot” I think we can now say there is “The Spot”–the new Michael Jordan Nike commercial, “Second Generation,” that brings chills to me and many other VC readers. Now ESPN has a lengthy story on the spot’s creation here. Most interesting is the strong implication that all the spots were recreated live without […]

Here is another basketball video from GoogleVideo (hat tip Club For Growth Blog), that is cool in an entirely different way than the Jordan commercial to which I linked yesterday (but you have to stay with it, it does not go where you think it is going at first). Apparently the embedding function–which I think […]

I thought that videos involving Michael Jordan could not give me chills anymore. I was wrong.

At 11:30am today, I will be speaking on “Scalia’s Infidelity: A Critique of Faint-Hearted Originalism” at the University of Texas School of Law. Tomorrow, I will be speaking on a panel at the International Contract Law Conference being held at Texas Wesleyan in Fort Worth. The panel is on “Theory and Anti-Theory: A Discussion,” and […]

At noon today (Thursday) I am giving a lecture on “The Presumption of Liberty and the Public Interest: Medical Marijuana and Fundamental Rights” at Washington University in St. Louis as part of the Public Interest Law Speakers Series (scroll down). The event will be held in the Bryan Cave Moot Courtroom. Last night I had […]

I will be giving a Federalist Society sponsored talk on “Scalia’s Infidelity: A Critique of Faint-Hearted Originalism” at the University of Pennsylvania Law School on Thursday (tomorrow) from 3-4:30pm in Silverman Hall, Room 240. Penn Law Prof Kermit Roosevelt (author of this novel) will be commenting. The paper on which my talk is based is […]

This afternoon, I am giving the William Howard Taft Lecture at the University of Cincinnati Law School. I take as my subject, Justice Scalia’s 1988 Taft Lecture, “Originalism: The Lesser Evil,” in which he describes himself as a “faint-hearted originalist.” The title of my talk is “Scalia’s Infidelity: A Critique of Faint-Hearted Originalism.” You can […]

As Orin noted, on Friday, I spoke on “Blogging and Scholarship” at a panel sponsored by the Section on Scholarship of the Association of American Law Schools. Here is the program description: One of the most salient developments in the internet revolution is blogging. Blogging has become a widespread cultural phenomenon and has had important […]

The Pocket Part, Yale Law Journal’s new on-line forum, just posted a provocative essay by Yale law profs Robert Post and Riva Siegel entitled, Questioning Justice: Law and Politics in Judicial Confirmation Hearings. There they propose questioning Supreme Court nominees as to how they would decide the classic cases of constitutional law: In . . […]

I have been very happy with the service and pricing of T-Mobile over the past year, as well as with the functionality of my Treo 600. Nevertheless, I was considering moving to Verizon when Palm announced the Treo 700w (and here) that would access their 3G high-speed wireless data network. The problem with such a […]

When I was in college, the two books I found most helpful to appreciate libertarianism were Murray Rothbard’s For a New Liberty (now available for free downloading here) and David Friedman’s, Machinery of Freedom (which was updated in 1989). As a senior at Northwestern, I taught a for-credit student-organized seminar on libertarianism that used both […]

Speaking of spying, John Fund reports: No TV series — not even “Star Trek” — has quite achieved the quirky cult status of “The Prisoner,” which first ran on British and U.S. networks almost 40 years ago. It now looks as if the show, which still airs in re-runs in some 60 countries, will be […]