Professor Barnett's upcoming lecture at UC Berkeley, discussed here. An excerpt:
Truth be told, libertarians have a love-hate relationship with the Constitution. On the one hand libertarians, like most Americans, revere the Constitution. Libertarians particularly appreciate its express guarantees of individual liberty and its mechanisms to preserve limited government. If being American is to subscribe to a creed, then the Constitution, along with the Declaration of Independence, are the foundational statements of this creed.
But some libertarians have issues with the Constitution as well. And here I speak for myself, as well as others. There was a reason I eschewed writing about and teaching Constitutional Law when I became a law professor in favor of teaching Contracts. For, after taking Constitutional Law in law school, I considered the Constitution a noble, but largely failed experiment in limiting the powers of government. In my con law class, every time we got to one of the “good parts” of the text that protected liberty, we turned the page to read a Supreme Court opinion explaining why that clause did not really mean what it appeared to mean
Posted at 6:21 AM