Georgetown’s Randy Barnett reflects on his journey to originalism at FSCHS dinner

Justice Jamie Grosshans, left, joined Georgetown Law Professor Randy Barnett at the Florida Supreme Court Historical Society’s “A Supreme Evening 2025” for a discussion on Barnett’s journey to originalism, a philosophy rooted in the belief that the Constitution’s meaning should remain unchanged unless formally amended.
“Originalism can be summarized in a single sentence: The meaning of the Constitution should remain the same until it is properly changed by amendment. That’s all originalism is.”
This succinct summation by Georgetown Law Professor Randy Barnett encapsulates his commitment to a constitutional philosophy that emphasizes fidelity to the Constitution’s text and meaning.
Barnett, the Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown University Law Center and faculty director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, spoke at the Florida Supreme Court Historical Society’s annual dinner in Tallahassee on January 16.
In a fireside chat with Justice Jamie Grosshans, Barnett reflected on his personal and intellectual journey, which has led him to become one of the nation’s leading proponents of originalism — a philosophy of constitutional interpretation that has gained traction in recent decades.
Barnett explained his path to originalism was shaped by his commitment to the idea that the Constitution’s meaning should remain constant unless formally amended. During the discussion with Grosshans, Barnett pointed to the shift he’s seen in the judicial landscape over the past two decades.
“It used to be you could have many, many constitutional cases in which the text of the Constitution is not even mentioned,” he said. “And in constitutional law, you might not even talk about the text of the Constitution; you would focus single-mindedly on the meaning of a judicial opinion about the Constitution, not the Constitution itself.”
Judges and justices now pay much more attention to the actual written Constitution than they used to, Barnett said, noting that past decisions often bypassed or ignored the Constitution’s text entirely.
He credited the late Justice Antonin Scalia with initiating the change, saying, “He was an indefatigable champion for moving text toward the center of constitutional decision-making, and the practice on the Supreme Court by all the justices, regardless of their political orientation or ideological priors, they all are way, way more attentive to the text than they used to be.”
Barnett’s embrace of originalism emerged through a gradual process that began in his law school years. As a student at Harvard, he said he entered law school believing in the Constitution and took Constitutional Law in his second year as a required course from Professor Laurence Tribe, a co-founder of the American Constitution Society.
While reading constitutional law casebooks, Barnett said he kept coming across “good parts,” like the Ninth Amendment.
“And I would read that and be like, ‘Wow, that’s amazing,’” he said. “Then I would turn the page of the casebook, and the Supreme Court would say, ‘Well, that doesn’t mean anything. In fact, what the court actually did was confuse it with the 10th Amendment.’ That’s how careful they were being. Then I would get to other things, like the Commerce Clause, and that would mean everything, and the Second Amendment would mean nothing, and the necessary and proper clause — that was a carte blanche to do anything you want. And I would read opinions like the Lochner case, which I happen to like, and I would turn the page and [read] ‘No, you are supposed to hate the Lochner case, that’s the worst thing you are supposed to do.’”
By the end of the course, Barnett admitted he was “done with Con Law,” believing that if the Supreme Court wasn’t going to pay attention to the Constitution, why should anyone else?
When Barnett became a law professor, he initially taught contracts, where he appreciated the value of written agreements. He recognized that, unlike the elastic interpretations in constitutional law, contracts had to be interpreted according to their text.
“In contract law, law still mattered,” he said. “Contracts was a sophisticated body of law that spent centuries being built up — and writings mattered.”
But over time, Barnett said he got pulled into constitutional law “against his better judgment,” and now that’s all he does.
He said he was influenced by his reading of Paul Brest’s 1980 article, The Misconceived Quest for Original Understanding, which critiqued the “original intent” approach to constitutional interpretation. In that article, Brest critiques the originalist approach, particularly the idea that the Constitution should be understood based on the intentions of its framers. Brest’s central argument is that seeking to understand the “original intent” of the framers is misguided and impractical.
Brest’s arguments convinced Barnett that the focus should shift from the often-murky intentions of the framers to the actual words and meaning of the Constitution.
“I was completely persuaded by that article,” said Barnett, adding that later, when he was teaching a seminar, he ran across a footnote in one of the articles he was teaching citing The Unconstitutionality of Slavery by Lysander Spooner, published in 1845.
“And I thought, ‘What could Lysander Spooner possibly have said in 1845 about the unconstitutionality of slavery?’” Barnett said. “Turns out it was a 290-page monograph, and what Spooner was doing in this book was responding to the radical abolitionists.”
He said radical abolitionists, like newspaper editor William Lloyd Garrison and his lawyer, Wendell Phillips, were arguing the Constitution “was a covenant with death and an agreement with hell” because it sanctioned slavery. At their protest demonstrations, supporters would burn copies of the Constitution, which made them very unpopular and was the reason many anti-slavery activists refused to call themselves abolitionists — they did not want to be associated with people who burned the Constitution, Barnett said.
When James Madison’s papers were published in 1840 for the first time, the Garrisonians mined those notes for all the evidence that the framers intended to protect or compromise with slavery. That led to abolitionist Wendell Phillips publishing The Constitution a Pro-Slavery Compact; or, Extracts from the Madison Papers, etc. Barnett said Spooner’s book was a response to Phillips’ work.
“And what Spooner argued was we don’t have to pay any attention to the intentions of the framers,” Barnett said. “The intentions of the framers are their own business. Whatever they may have intended in Philadelphia is their own business; that is not what binds us. That is not the law. The law are the words they produced. The law is the text. And what Spooner said was the law was the original meaning of the Constitution. And if you look at all the provisions that are supposedly the slave provisions, none of them use the word ‘slave’; they use euphemisms — persons held to service, or they refer to enslaved people as persons. And he said we are not bound by guilty meaning; we are not bound by the evil meaning that has been placed upon those words. In practice, we are only bound by the innocent meaning those words can have because, after all, euphemisms are good words that you say instead of bad words.”
“This is a version of originalism that I can do something with,” Barnett recalled thinking as he read Spooner’s work. Unlike the original intent approach, which focused on what the framers may have meant, Spooner’s theory centered on the Constitution’s text, arguing that the document’s language — particularly its use of euphemisms for slavery — should be interpreted in its most innocent sense.
That persuaded Barnett that the right way to approach the Constitution is to take the Constitution seriously.
“Unbeknownst to me, because I did not run in those circles, Antonin Scalia, who was then a circuit court judge, had come to the same conclusion for completely different reasons,” Barnett said. “He was a legislation guy and he thought statutes should be interpreted this way, and therefore so should the Constitution. And he was telling people in the [Ed] Meese Justice Department . . . during Ronald Reagan’s second term, that they should forget about this framers’ intent stuff and focus on original meaning.”
Barnett said when his theoretical scholarship, Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty, came out in 2004, Scalia was making the same move and was going around the country “in his emphatic way defending the practice of adhering to the meaning of the text and saying that justices and judges and all constitutional authorities are bound by the meaning of the text because the meaning of the text should remain the same until it is properly changed by amendment.”
Reflecting on his journey, Barnett acknowledged that he never expected to become a leading constitutional scholar. “If you would have asked me when I was in law school whether I would ever play a role in [constitutional interpretation], I would have told you, you needed to have your head examined,” he said with a laugh.
For Barnett, originalism remains not just a legal theory but a call to honor the Constitution in its true form. As he put it, “The meaning of the Constitution should remain the same until it is properly changed by amendment.”