Randy Barnett
Director

Randy E. Barnett is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theory at the Georgetown University Law Center, where he teaches constitutional law and contracts. After graduating from Northwestern University and Harvard Law School, he tried many felony cases as a prosecutor in the Cook County States’ Attorney’s Office in Chicago. In 2004, he argued the medical marijuana case of Gonzales v. Raich in the Supreme Court, and in 2012, he was one of the attorneys representing the National Federation of Independent Business in its constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act.  In 2008, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Constitutional Studies.  He has been a visiting professor at Northwestern, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard Law School.

Professor Barnett’s publications includes more than one hundred articles and reviews, as well as nine books, including Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty (Princeton, 2005), Constitutional Law: Cases in Context (Wolters-Kluwer, 2008), Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law: Contracts (Oxford 2010) and Contracts: Cases and Doctrine (Wolters-Kluwer, 4th ed. 2008). His book, The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law (Oxford, 1998) was published in Japanese.

Lawrence B. Solum
Senior Scholar

Lawrence B. Solum, John Carroll Research Professor of Law, is an internationally recognized legal theorist, who works in constitutional theory, procedure, and the philosophy of law. Professor Solum received his J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and received his B.A. with highest departmental honors in philosophy from the University of California at Los Angeles. Professor Solum is the Editor of Legal Theory Blog, an influential weblog that focuses on developments in contemporary normative and positive legal theory. 

Professor Solum contributes to debates in legal theory, including constitutional theory and interpretation, and the intersection of law and political philosophy. His most recent book (with Robert W. Bennett) is Constitutional Originalism: A Debate (Cornell, 2011). He has authored scholarly articles in numerous journals including the American Journal of Jurisprudence, Cornell Law Review, Emory Law Journal, the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, the Harvard Law Review, the North Carolina Law Review, Nomos, the Notre Dame Law Review, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Southern California Law Review, Texas Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, and the Virginia Law Review.

John D. Ohlendorf
Fellow and Visiting Lecturer 

John D. Ohlendorf is a graduate of Bethany Lutheran College and Harvard Law School (magna cum laude), where he was an editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. After clerking for Judge Raymond Gruender of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, he was an Olin-Searle-Smith Fellow in Law at Northwestern University School of Law. His publications include “Textualism and the Problem of Scrivener’s Error, in the Maine Law Review (2011), and “Politics, Constitutional Interpretation, and Media Ecology: An Argument Against Judicial

Minimalism,” in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy (2008). His research agenda focuses on statutory and constitutional interpretation, and the implication of silence for textual meaning.  He is currently writing about “Textualism and Obstacle Preemption” and “Constitutionally Required Writing: Is There a Message in the Medium?”.