Randy E. Barnett on Polycentric Legal Orders

Barnett discusses a variety of methods for constraining state power.

Randy E. Barnett

Randy E. Barnett is the Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law at the Georgetown University Law Center and is the Faculty 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 includes twelve 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 (2021) (with Evan Bernick). His other books on the Constitution include: 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. forthcoming 2022) (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).

Professor Randy E. Barnett teaches constitutional law and contracts at the Georgetown University Law Center. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. In this 1997 lecture from a meeting of the International Society of Individual Liberty he speaks broadly on various methods of constraining state power including federalism and the separation of powers, the power of exit, and existing and theoretical polycentric legal orders. Barnett suggests that two simple rules must be present for polycentric orders to work: a “nonconfiscation principle,” and a “competition principle.”