Randy E. Barnett

Faculty Director

Randy E. Barnett is the Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law at the Georgetown University Law Center and is Director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. 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. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Constitutional Studies and the Bradley Prize, Professor Barnett has been a visiting professor at Penn, Northwestern and Harvard Law School.

Professor Barnett’s publications include thirteen books, more than one hundred and fifty articles and reviews, as well as numerous op-eds. His most recent book is A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist (2024). His other books on the Constitution include: The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment: Its Letter and Spirit (2021) (with Evan Bernick); An Introduction to Constitutional Law: 100 Supreme Court Cases Everyone Should Know (2019) (with Josh Blackman); Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty (2nd ed. 2013); Our Republican Constitution: Securing the Liberty and Sovereignty of We the People (2016); and Constitutional Law: Cases in Context (4th ed. 2021) (with Josh Blackman). His books on contracts are The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law: Contracts (2010) and Contracts: Cases and Doctrine (7th ed. 2021) (with Nate Oman). And he is the author of The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law (2nd ed. 2014).

In 2004, he argued the medical marijuana case of Gonzalez v. Raich before the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2012, he was one of the lawyers representing the National Federation of Independent Business in its constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act in NFIB v. Sebelius. He’s appeared in numerous documentaries, including PBS’s Constitution USA with Peter Sagal and A More or Less Perfect Union with Judge Douglas Ginsburg; and he portrayed a prosecutor in the 2010 science-fiction feature film, InAlienable: The Movie. He blogs on the Volokh Conspiracy.

Stephanie Barclay

Faculty Co-Director

Stephanie Barclay is a Professor of Law at Georgetown Law School, and the Faculty Co-Director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. Her research focuses on the role our different democratic institutions play in protecting minority rights, particularly at the intersection of free speech and religious exercise. Barclay‘s work is published or is forthcoming in leading journals such as the Harvard Law Review, the Chicago Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal Forum. Her article, “An Economic Approach to Religious Exemptions,” was selected for the 2020 Stanford/Harvard/Yale Junior Faculty Forum.

Prior to joining Georgetown, Barclay was twice voted Professor of the Year. Barclay has also litigated constitutional cases at both the trial and appellate level, including before the U.S. Supreme Court. Barclay served as a law clerk to Judge N. Randy Smith on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and to Justice Neil M. Gorsuch of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Barclay is a Faculty Affiliate at the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School; and a Nootbaar Fellow at the Nootbaar Institute on Law, Religion, and Ethics at Pepperdine University. She has served as the Chair for the AALS Law and Religion Section, and she currently serves as a Research Associate for the Centre for Constitutional Law and Legal Studies at the University of British Columbia, and on the Steering Committee for the Quill Project at Pembroke College. She graduated summa cum laude from BYU Law School, where she was elected to the Order of the Coif. She is completing a Ph.D. in Law at Oxford University as a Clarendon Scholar and a Tang Scholar.

Matthew Mangiaracina

Program Director

Matthew Mangiaracina is Program Director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. He previously worked as Associate Director for the Project on Constitutional Originalism and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition (CIT) at the Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law under CIT Co-Directors Joel Alicea and Kevin Walsh. He also served as the Assistant Secretary of Community Planning and Development in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and as White House Liaison for the U.S. Department of the Interior. He is a graduate of Florida State University and lives in Maryland with his wife and four daughters.

Arielle Vertsman

Program Manager

Arielle is the Program Manager and a second-year evening student at Georgetown Law. She graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2020 with a major in Government and Politics and a minor in Spanish Heritage Language, Culture and Professional Contexts. After graduating from college, Arielle worked as an advertising professional at the Omnicom Media Group, one of the largest global media, marketing, and communications companies before going on to join Infillion, an advertising technology firm in New York City. She is an avid skier and Broadway enthusiast.

 

Christian Lee González-Rivera

Visiting Scholar

Christian Lee González-Rivera is an Assistant Professor of Law at St. Thomas University Benjamin L. Crump College of Law in the tenure track. His teaching focuses on Constitutional Law, including First Amendment, Advanced Constitutional Law, and Comparative Constitutional Law. He also teaches an annual seminar on Jurisprudence, where students learn to think about classical and contemporary legal methodologies, philosophies of law, and theories of interpretation.

Professor González-Rivera’s legal scholarship currently centers on three main ongoing projects. First, the development of an originalist theory of constitutional interpretation that incorporates and operationalizes Policy-Oriented Jurisprudence (the works of Myres McDougal, Harold Lasswell, and Michael Reisman) in our domestic adjudication process, centered around the concepts of human dignity, freedom, and flourishing. Second, a theory and empirical account of federal police powers, especially in the case of emergencies or so-called “states of exception,” to better analyze and appraise judicial review of emergency Covid-19 measures during the last 4 years. And third, a theory and account of the intersection of our constitutional law and international law and human rights commitments.

Professor González-Rivera has been recently awarded a fellowship as a Visiting Scholar at Georgetown Law’s Center for the Constitution, where he will conduct and present some of his research and writing on federal emergency police powers this Fall 2024. He is also a Visiting Professor at Universidad Panamericana, Facultad de Derecho, Mexico City Campus, Mexico, where he has taught a law school seminar introducing Policy-Oriented Jurisprudence and applying it to a given constitutional problem—in July 2024, the topic was U.S. Emergency Constitutionalism.

Professor González-Rivera holds a B.A. in Psychology and Philosophy from the University of Puerto Rico (magna cum laude), a Certificate of Graduate Studies in Greek and Latin Languages from the University of Vermont (magna cum laude), and a J.D. (magna cum laude) and LL.M. (summa cum laude) in Intercultural Human Rights from St. Thomas University College of Law. As a philosophy and classics student, he published and presented papers on Aristotelian Ontology and Hellenistic Ethics, focusing on the role of metaphor in philosophical argument. In law school, he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Intercultural Human Rights Law Review and Vice President of the School’s International Moot Court team, among other roles, publishing several law review articles on topics ranging from international law and human trafficking to federalism and jurisprudence.Upon graduating, Professor González-Rivera served as senior law clerk to the Honorable Judge Fleur Lobree at Florida’s Third District Court of Appeal, where he managed over 200 appeals and writ petitions. Before joining STU as a full-time Assistant Professor of Law, he worked as trial and appellate counsel at the firm of Butler Weihmuller Katz & Craig LLP, primarily handling federal cases.

Yonatan Green

Fellow

Yonatan Green is co-founder and former Executive Director of the Israel Law & Liberty Forum, a Tikvah Fund project promoting conservative legal thought and the rule of law in Israel. His research interests include Israeli jurisprudence, comparative constitutional law and political theory. Yonatan is a licensed attorney in Israel and in the State of New York. He obtained a joint degree in Law and Communications from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has previously worked as an associate attorney in the Jerusalem-based firm of Ephraim Abramson & Co. Law Offices, and as a project manager and product manager at Israeli tech firm Mobileye, a global leader in autonomous driving and driver assistance technology. He was formerly a policy researcher at the Kohelet Policy Forum.  Yonatan has been published and quoted in a variety of academic, intellectual and news outlets, in English and in Hebrew, including The Federalist Society ReviewLiberty Law Talk podcast, National Review, Mishpatim (Hebrew University) Law Review, the

Times of Israel, the Jerusalem Post, CNN, Mosaic, Haaretz, Israel Today, Hashiloach, France 3, and the “Unholy” podcast. His work has been cited by the Israeli Supreme Court. He is married and a proud father of three.