Georgetown University enters The Bob Zadek Show not as a topic but as an affiliation: the institution where guests and the scholars they cite teach, and, in one episode, one of several universities named in a discussion of slavery and reparations. The excerpts do not describe the university’s founding, its governance, its curriculum, or its place in any legal dispute. What they supply is a set of references — a law professor, a book, a team membership, an endowment — each attached to a named speaker.
Randy Barnett and the Presumption of Liberty
In the June 27, 2015 episode, Baylen Linnekin, identified by Bob Zadek as the executive director of the Keep Food Legal Foundation, cites Randy Barnett as a professor at Georgetown University, “a law professor there whose work I admire greatly.” Baylen Linnekin on the Front lines of the Fight for Food Freedom (2015) Zadek responds by naming Barnett’s book Restoring the Lost Constitution and calling him a great libertarian legal scholar; Linnekin agrees and identifies the book’s subtitle as “Presumption of Liberty.” Zadek says the book changed his whole way of thinking about the law.
Linnekin then states the idea he draws from Barnett: that the government should presume that we have a right, with the burden on the government to demonstrate if and where we do not have a right and to explain why. He contrasts this with the presumption in economic cases, many food cases among them, that the government has the authority to regulate, ban and restrict, and says that flipping the burden and enabling a slightly higher level of scrutiny would make it more difficult for the government to prove that a given ban is appropriate. He says a lot of his work is devoted to that very thing.
The Barnett reference sits inside a longer exchange about warning labels and bans. Zadek frames the distinction between a warning label, which gives information, and an outright ban, which he calls a great deprivation of liberty where the product is merely bad for you rather than something that will kill you in an hour. Linnekin answers with the saying that the dose makes the poison, notes that drinking too much water kills people every year, and offers raw milk as an example: if every person who consumed raw milk got sick because it always contained pathogens, government would have a pretty good case to consider banning it, but that is not the case, and yet raw milk is banned in interstate commerce and in many states, with loopholes such as buying it as pet food. Georgetown appears in this episode only as Barnett’s academic affiliation.
Georgetown among universities named in the reparations discussion
In the December 6, 2020 episode, Michael Tanner draws a distinction between private and public reparations. Private reparations, he says, can be directed at identifiable beneficiaries of slavery — certain banks, certain insurance companies that started by selling insurance on enslaved property, and universities like Georgetown and Harvard whose endowments, he says, were largely built on the sale of slaves. Towards a Libertarian Theory of Anti-Racism (2020) Such institutions, he says, can take steps to rectify that by giving scholarships to descendants of some of the slaves they know they bought and sold.
Tanner treats public reparations as a much harder question, listing the difficulties: who is entitled, how one proves descent from slaves given very poor record-keeping, what about people who immigrated after slavery but then had to go through Jim Crow, who has to pay, whether people whose forefathers were not involved in slavery pay, whether recent immigrants pay, and whether descendants on both sides — given widespread rape during slavery, many African Americans have white ancestors — would be paying themselves. On a practical basis, he says, you have to rule out the idea of reparations, though there is a moral debt owed to African Americans for 400 years of mistreatment that should be kept in mind. Zadek characterizes this as saying the moral debt is an appropriate topic for continued conversation rather than a call to action, and Tanner agrees that it is not something you solve by legislation, pointing to the recent apology for slavery as an example of what can be done in recognizing and memorializing the problem.
The Georgetown reference here is one item in a list of institutions; the excerpt does not elaborate on the university’s endowment, the specific transactions involved, or any steps it has taken.
Caroline Fredrickson and the Constitution Drafting Project
In the November 22, 2021 episode, Zadek introduces Caroline Fredrickson as a distinguished professor of law at Georgetown University, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, and a recent appointee by President Biden to his commission to study the Supreme Court. Caroline Fredrickson on the Progressive Constitution (2021) He introduces her as a member of the Progressive Team in the National Constitution Center’s Constitution Drafting Project, which he describes as bringing together three teams of distinguished scholars — progressive, libertarian and conservative — each asked to rewrite the Constitution to reflect their values. Zadek notes that Timothy Sandefur had appeared two weeks earlier as a member of the Libertarian Team, and says Fredrickson’s hour will help listeners understand the progressive view of how America should be governed.
Fredrickson’s own contribution to the excerpt is brief: she says it is a pleasure to be with Zadek. The excerpt does not record her description of the Progressive Constitution’s changes, and Georgetown appears only in Zadek’s introduction of her credentials.
Across episodes
The three episodes do not argue a common question about Georgetown. In 2015 the university is the academic home of Randy Barnett, whose presumption-of-liberty framework Baylen Linnekin invokes in a food-freedom argument; in 2020 it is one of several universities Michael Tanner names among institutions whose endowments were built on the sale of slaves, in a discussion of private versus public reparations; in 2021 it is the affiliation of Caroline Fredrickson, a member of the Progressive Team in the National Constitution Center’s Constitution Drafting Project. The excerpts show no development in how the university is treated — only three unrelated references, each advanced by a different speaker.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state Georgetown’s founding date, location, religious affiliation, governance, enrollment, or curriculum, nor any lawsuit, statute or policy in which the university was a party. They do not describe the university’s endowment beyond Tanner’s assertion that it was largely built on the sale of slaves, and they do not report any response by Georgetown to that assertion or any reparative step it has taken. Barnett’s and Fredrickson’s fields are given only as law, and the excerpts do not record Fredrickson’s account of the Progressive Constitution.