Restoring the Lost Constitution; The Presumption of Liberty

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. Updated Edition [stated]. First printing [stated]. Trade paperback. Very good. Format is approximately 6 inches by 9.25 inches. xv, [3], 430 pages. Footnotes. Index of Cases. Index of Names. General Index. Cover has slight wear and soiling. Signed by the author on the title page. Randy Evan Barnett (born February 5, 1952) is an American legal scholar. He serves as the Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown University, where he teaches constitutional law and contracts, and is the 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. Barnett's publications includes eleven books, more than one hundred articles and reviews, as well as numerous op-eds. His most recent book is The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment: Its Letter and Spirit (with Evan Bernick). His other books on the Constitution are 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), The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law (2nd ed.) , Our Republican Constitution: Securing the Liberty and Sovereignty of We the People, and Constitutional Law: Cases in Context (3rd ed.) (with Josh Blackman). His books on Contracts are The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law: Contracts, Contracts: Cases and Doctrine (6th ed.) (with Nate Oman). The U.S. Constitution found in school textbooks and under glass in Washington is not the one enforced today by the Supreme Court. In Restoring the Lost Constitution, Randy Barnett argues that since the nation's founding, but especially since the 1930s, the courts have been cutting holes in the original Constitution and its amendments to eliminate the parts that protect liberty from the power of government. From the Commerce Clause, to the Necessary and Proper Clause, to the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, to the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court has rendered each of these provisions toothless. In the process, the written Constitution has been lost. Barnett establishes the original meaning of these lost clauses and offers a practical way to restore them to their central role in constraining government: adopting a "presumption of liberty" to give the benefit of the doubt to citizens when laws restrict their rightful exercises of liberty. He also provides a new, realistic and philosophically rigorous theory of constitutional legitimacy that justifies both interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning and, where that meaning is vague or open-ended, construing it so as to better protect the rights retained by the people. As clearly argued as it is insightful and provocative, Restoring the Lost Constitution forcefully disputes the conventional wisdom, posing a powerful challenge to which others must now respond. This updated edition features an afterword with further reflections on individual popular sovereignty, originalist interpretation, judicial engagement, and the gravitational force that original meaning has exerted on the Supreme Court in several recent cases.