Restoring the Lost Constitution PDF

Randy E. Barnett ist Carmack-Waterhouse-Professor für Rechtstheorie am Georgetown University Law Center, wo er Verfassungsrecht und Verträge lehrt. Nach seinem Abschluss an der Northwestern University und der Harvard Law School verhandelte er als Staatsanwalt in der Staatsanwaltschaft des Cook County State in Chicago in vielen Verbrechensfällen. Er war Gastprofessor an der Northwestern und der Harvard Law School. 2008 erhielt er ein Guggenheim-Stipendium für konstitutionelle Studien. Im Jahr 2004 erschien Barnett vor dem Obersten Gerichtshof der USA, um im Fall Gonzalez gegen Raich über medizinisches Cannabis zu argumentieren. Er hält international Vorträge und trat in Radio- und Fernsehprogrammen wie CBS Evening News, PBS NewsHour, Talk of the Nation (NPR), Hannity & Colmes (FOX) und der Ricki Lake Show auf. Er hielt die Kobe 2000-Vorlesungen in Jurisprudenz an der Universität Tokio und der Doshisha-Universität in Kyoto. Barnetts Stipendium umfasst mehr als 80 Artikel und Rezensionen sowie 8 Bücher, darunter Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty (Princeton, 2004), Constitutional Law: Cases in Context (Aspen 2008), Contracts Cases and Doctrine (Aspen, 4 Aufl. 2008) und Our Republican Constitution: Securing the Liberty and Sovereignty of We the People (Broadside Books, 2016).

Restoring the Lost Constitution pdf von Randy Barnett

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.