About me
Randy E. Barnett is the Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown University Law Center and is the Founder and Director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. One of the nation’s foremost constitutional scholars, he has been at the center of some of the most consequential legal battles of our time.
After graduating from Northwestern University and Harvard Law School, Barnett began his career trying felony cases as a prosecutor in Chicago. His most recent book, Felony Review: Tales of True Crime and Corruption in Chicago (Encounter Books 2026), chronicles his experiences as a prosecutor. He portrayed a prosecutor in the 2010 feature film: Inalienable.
He later emerged as a leading advocate for constitutional originalism and the presumption of liberty, arguing landmark cases before the U.S. Supreme Court — including Gonzalez v. Raich and serving as part of the legal team challenging the Affordable Care Act on behalf of the National Federation of Independent Business.
A Guggenheim Fellow in Constitutional Studies and visiting professor at Harvard, Penn, and Northwestern, Barnett is the author of thirteen books and more than two hundred scholarly articles. His works include Our Republican Constitution, Restoring the Lost Constitution, and The Structure of Liberty, all of which argue that the Constitution is not merely a framework for governance, but a charter for protecting the sovereignty and liberty of “We the People.”
In scholarship, litigation, and public debate, Barnett continues to insist that the Constitution means what it says — and that enforcing it matters. He is currently writing a book on libertarianism entitled, Freedom and Flourishing: Libertarianism for the Real World.
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