Who are “We the People”? Are we a collective body whose majority will is sovereign, or are we individuals whose inalienable rights government exists to secure?

In Our Republican Constitution: Securing the Liberty and Sovereignty of We the People, Randy Barnett argues that America’s founding charter was designed not as a license for democratic majorities, but as a bulwark protecting the rights of each individual against the encroachments of government—and that the long drift toward a “Democratic Constitution” has eroded the very liberties the Founders enshrined. Barnett is the Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown University Law Center and Faculty Director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution; he argued Gonzalez v. Raich before the U.S. Supreme Court and was a lead architect of the constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act in NFIB v. Sebelius.

As part of this episode, Barnett will also draw on his new true-crime memoir, Felony Review: Tales of True Crime and Corruption in Chicago, recounting the murder cases and moral dilemmas he confronted as a young prosecutor in the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, as well as his biography A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist, which traces his decades-long fight to restore the Constitution’s original meaning.