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Randy Barnett’s Felony Review is, in one obvious sense, a sequel to A Life for Liberty: his previous book gave us the intellectual arc, while this one recovers material that couldn’t fit there and brings us down from the heights of constitutional theory to the police station, the courtroom, and the corruption-prone machinery of criminal justice. Alan Dershowitz, who taught Barnett at Harvard Law and wrote the foreword to this book, is exactly right to say that his student’s earlier work gave readers a “top-down view” of the legal system, while Felony Review lets us see it “from the bottom up.”
What makes that bottom-up view so unusual is not merely that Barnett later became a famous law professor. It’s that he first spent four years as a line prosecutor in Cook County, Chicago’s famously crooked legal world. He was not some token federal appointee parachuting in for a résumé line, but an assistant state’s attorney doing the actual work. That’s rare enough among legal academics; it’s unheard of among constitutional scholars. Barnett did more than study institutions. He lived them in their least flattering form: the drudgery, the adrenaline, the tactical lies, the moral ambiguities, and the daily need to separate real cases from garbage. Cook County wasn’t a laboratory of democracy—it was democracy’s underbelly.
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Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute.