A Life for Liberty: Professor Randy Barnett Chronicles ‘the Making of an American Originalist’ in New Memoir

“I never expected to do any of those things,” he told a lively student audience during a recent conversation about his new memoir, A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist, at an event co-hosted by the Federalist Society and the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, where Barnett serves as faculty director. “I had to add them to my list after the fact.”

Drawing on decades of personal records, the book offers a vivid account of Barnett’s upbringing in Calumet City, Ill. and the intellectual influences that shaped him as a student at Northwestern University and Harvard Law School. It also details the “bucket list” experiences that define his work as a legal scholar and practitioner, among them arguing the medical marijuana case Gonzales v. Raich before the Supreme Court in 2004 and developing the constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act in 2012’s National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius.

We spoke with Barnett about his writing process, the advice he’d offer law students and how working as a prosecutor prepared him to become a law professor.

You’ve authored 13 books, most of them on constitutional law and contracts. What motivated you to write a memoir?

I had my first grandchild eight years ago, and started to think about the fact that someday my grandchildren might want a record of the things that I’ve done. I had enormously important mentors — my father, my grade-school band leader, my high-school debate coach and others. The book is a tribute to them, and a reminder for others to thank their mentors while they still can. I also tried to be candid about my character flaws and professional mistakes in the interest of encouraging readers to address their own shortcomings.

One of your flaws might surprise readers: You write that you were a bad law student, in part due to a tendency to resist your professors’ arguments. What advice would you give law students today?

My advice is to suspend your disbelief in what messages you think your professors are trying to indoctrinate you with. If your principles are true principles, they’re not going to go away just because you suspend your disbelief. What you really ought to do is try to get inside your professors’ heads and see the world and the law the way they do. That will certainly help you on exams, but more importantly it will allow you to get more out of your law school education.

Throughout the book, you grapple with a certain outsider status, whether personally — you describe the challenges of growing up as a Jewish kid in a predominantly Catholic community — or in terms of your ideological commitment to originalism and libertarianism. How have those experiences shaped you?

One of my mentors, [the economist and political philosopher] Murray Rothbard once told me that the most successful intellectuals are people who are not completely of the culture in which they exist. They can observe the culture in a way that people who are completely immersed in it can’t. That’s part of what makes someone a successful intellectual: noticing things that others don’t and writing and publishing ideas that are somewhat novel or new or different from the mainstream. In my case, I have no shortage of things that nobody else will say besides me.

The book also details your journey to originalism, including a pivotal moment after reading lawyer and abolitionist Lysander Spooner’s 1845 book The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, which argues in favor of the Constitution’s original meaning as distinct from the framers’ original intent. If you could address one misconception about originalism, what would it be?

People tend to think of originalism as a conservative theory for conservative results. In fact, originalism can be summarized in a single sentence: that the meaning of the Constitution should remain the same until it’s properly changed by amendment — and that has neither a conservative nor a progressive valence to it.

You’ve said that a commitment to justice has been the guiding principle of your career. What role do legal scholars play in that?

Like many at Georgetown Law, I believe in making the world a better place. For me, writing is the process of discovery and publishing is the process of adding to the store of human knowledge and thereby making the world a better place.

Before you were a law professor, you were a prosecutor in the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office in Chicago. Did that experience influence your approach to academia at all?

When I was a prosecutor, the Circuit Court of Cook County was quite corrupt. Not everyone acted in good faith. Part of the challenge was that everyone — judges, defense attorneys, cops, even court personnel — would try to get around you or convince you to do what they wanted. I had to learn to stand on my own two feet. As an academic, you also have to stand up for yourself and your ideas. Being a prosecutor prepared me for that.

Do you have any other book projects on the horizon?

My next book, Felony Review: Tales of True Crime and Corruption in Chicago, is about my experience on felony review, the unit that works with the Chicago Police Department to approve felony charges. Many of those stories are not about trying cases, but about being in police stations, working with cops and interviewing suspects. There’s also an underlying mystery theme that I don’t want to give away.

I’m also working on a restatement of libertarianism. I’ve been involved in libertarianism since I was in college. Fifty years later, I think there is room for improving the libertarian model, for example, by becoming more attentive to the dangers to liberty posed by private agents and corporations. One of the big differences between libertarianism and originalism is that originalism has had a lot of internal debate for 30 years, which has made the theory more robust. People are not debating and discussing the nuances of libertarianism anymore, and they haven’t for a long time. The theory has become frozen in amber, and I think it needs updating.