Author Archive | Randy Barnett

Ed Brayton on Positive Liberty has an excellent post on the Ninth Amendment (on which he partially relies on my work). He is responding to the argument, expressed by a law professor on a listserve, that was recently put forth in the Texas Law Review by Professor Kurt Lash of Loyola-Marymount. Professor Lash’s thesis has […]

In the free section of today’s OpinionJournal.com, Manny Miranda takes the Bush staffers to task for their shoddy handling of the “Federalist Society´issue.” Judge Roberts’s ties with the Federalist Society are not the story. If Judge Roberts is not a member, he’s not a member. But the White House should not be in the business […]

There is a nice debate on LegalAffairs Debate Club between Erwin Chemerinsky and Brannon Denning on the sorts of questioning that Senators should engage in during Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Brannon is off to a strong start. Here is his closing shot: However, as I am sure you would agree, it is often quite difficult […]

My son Gary, who is interning this summer at the Cato Institute, had his letter to the editor published today in The Washington Post. I believe this is a first for an offspring of a Volokh Conspirator.

Here is announcement from the Boston University Journal of Science and Technology: Boston University Journal of Science and Technology Law announces a Colloquium, to be held February 11, 2006, to consider the legal complexities facing the growing blogging community. Our goal is to collect a body of scholarship on the legal issues bloggers face in […]

Blogging is likely to remain light as I teach at an IES seminar here in Gummersbach, Germany, but you never know. In the meantime, Ryan Sager has an interesting column on the confirmation process in the New York Post called Question the Court. Here is how it begins: Either judges are fallible human beings, prone […]

For the past month, I have been deep into writing a new major work on the Ninth Amendment, entitled, “Five Originalist Models of the Ninth Amendment.” (When it is ready in August, you will hear about it here first and I will make it available to everyone on SSRN.) So I have been blogging light […]

After wading through Judge Roberts’ judicial opinions, Larry Solum has reached the following conclusion: Judge Roberts won’t Bork himself.

I published the post below without activating comments, which I discover you cannot do after the fact. So I am doing so here for comments on that post.

Jonathan Adler says John Roberts is the “best available” nominee. John Podhoretz says he is a “boring choice.” So which is it? . . . . Sorry, I seemed to have fallen asleep. I guess that means Podhoretz is right. John Roberts is who you get when the President finally nominates the “best qualified” candidate. […]

There is a great debate on the Kelo case today on National Review Online between two friends of mine, Jonathan Adler and Scott Bullock. The debate concerns the original meaning and judicial effect the “public use” portion of the Takings Clause. The only sour note in the exchange is when Jonathan says: I will not […]

A nice post here by Ed Brayton on judicial activism in which he cites an article by Keenan Kmiec in the California Law Review (vol. 92, page 1441 (2004)) last year called “The Origin and Current Meaning of ‘Judicial Activism’” (apparently not available on line). While I have not read this article, I have met […]

Barnett Study Debunked- No Proof of GHG Climate Change. Whew, different Barnett! This must happen all the time to people with more common family names.

Checkpoint Charlie (seen here) was the famous exit from West Berlin (formerly the American Sector) to East Berlin (formerly the Soviet Sector). I now read here that a memorial to the 1065 persons shot and killed while trying to escape to freedom is being dismantled. Reading this reminded me of my trip through Checkpoint Charlie […]

It is sometimes forgotten that the purpose of the Declaration of Independence was not only to declare independence from Great Britain, but to justify that political separation. To the colonists, it was not enough that the British had violated their rights. Every government violates the rights of the people from time to time and this […]