For Immediate Release
April 14, 2008

Media Contact:
Kara Tershel, (202) 662-9500

Prof. Randy Barnett

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Georgetown University Law Center Professor Randy Barnett has been selected as an inaugural recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Constitutional Studies for his project, "The Reconstructed Constitution."

Barnett plans to examine how the constitutional theories of radical abolitionists, although rejected by the courts, were enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution and how these efforts were later gutted by the Supreme Court as too radical. He maintains that constitutional law has suffered ever since.

"I hope to raise the visibility and stature of these heroes of liberty: the radical abolitionist constitutional theorists and the leaders of the Thirty-Ninth Congress who fought to enshrine their vision of liberty into the text of the Constitution," said Barnett. Coinciding with the Guggenheim announcement, his new solo-authored casebook, "Constitutional Law: Cases in Context," was published by Aspen.

Barnett, the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theory, joined the Georgetown Law faculty in 2006 after serving as a visiting professor. Before coming to Georgetown, he was the Austin B. Fletcher Professor at the Boston University School of Law. He has also been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and Northwestern University. He has taught constitutional law, contracts, cyber law, torts, criminal law, evidence, agency and partnership, and jurisprudence.

After graduating from Northwestern University and Harvard Law School, Barnett served as a prosecutor in the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office in Chicago. In 2004, he argued the medical marijuana case of Gonzales v. Raich in the U.S. Supreme Court and, in 2006, returned to the Ninth Circuit to argue the case on remand. He has produced more than 80 articles and reviews, as well as eight books, including, "Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty" (Princeton, 2004), "Contract Cases and Doctrine" (Aspen, 4th ed. 2007) and "Perspectives on Contract Law" (Aspen, 3rd ed. 2005). His book, "The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law" (Oxford, 1998), has been translated into Japanese.

The newly established Guggenheim Fellowships in Constitutional Studies, awarded to Barnett and University of Michigan Law Professor Richard Primus, were made possible by the Dorothy Tapper Goldman Foundation.

Barnett is one of 190 artists, scientists and scholars to receive a 2008 Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. With awards totaling $8.2 million, the recipients were chosen from a pool of more than 2,600 applicants.

Since its establishment in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has granted more than $265 million in Fellowships to almost 16,500 individuals who have demonstrated stellar scholarly achievement and outstanding promise for future accomplishment in the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities and creative arts.

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