ZadekpediaGeorgetown University enters The Bob Zadek Show not as a topic but as a point of reference: a place where named scholars work, and an institution named in an argument about historical wrongs. Across three episodes the university is mentioned in passing, and the episodes record only what the speakers say about it.
Randy Barnett and the presumption of liberty
In a discussion of food freedom, Baylen Linnekin, executive director of the Keep Food Legal Foundation, invoked Randy Barnett, whom he described as a professor at Georgetown University and a law professor there whose work he admires greatly Baylen Linnekin on the Front lines of the Fight for Food Freedom (2015). Bob Zadek supplied the title of Barnett’s book, Restoring the Lost Constitution, calling it a magnificent book and describing Barnett as a great libertarian legal scholar. Linnekin agreed, and identified the book’s subtitle as “Presumption of Liberty.”
Linnekin’s use of Barnett’s idea was concrete. He said 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. As Zadek put it, in economic cases and many food cases the presumption is that the government has the authority to regulate, to ban and to restrict. Linnekin said that flipping the burden and enabling a slightly higher level of scrutiny of the government’s actions would make it more difficult for the government to prove that a given ban is appropriate, and that a lot of his work is devoted to doing that very thing.
The exchange also shows Zadek’s own reaction to Barnett’s work: he said it changed his whole way of thinking about the law when he read it, and called it a profoundly important book. The Georgetown affiliation is the only institutional fact the excerpt supplies about Barnett; his arguments are attributed to him through Linnekin’s and Zadek’s descriptions.
Georgetown in the reparations discussion
In an episode on anti-racism, Michael Tanner drew a distinction between private and public reparations. Private reparations, he said, can target 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 said, were largely built on the sale of slaves Towards a Libertarian Theory of Anti-Racism (2020). Such institutions, in his account, can take steps to rectify that by giving scholarships to descendants of some of the slaves that they know that they bought and sold.
Tanner contrasted this with reparations out of the public purse, which he called much more problematic, listing practical difficulties: who is entitled, how descent from slaves can be proved given poor record-keeping, what about people who immigrated after slavery but went through Jim Crow, who has to pay, and whether descendants of both enslaved and white ancestors would be paying themselves. He said that on a practical basis the idea of public reparations has to be ruled out, while a moral debt is owed to African Americans for 400 years of mistreatment and should be kept in mind. Zadek characterized Tanner’s position as treating the matter as an appropriate topic for continued conversation rather than a call to action, and Tanner agreed that it is not something solved by legislation.
Georgetown appears here only as one of two universities Tanner names as examples of institutions whose endowments were built on the sale of slaves.
Caroline Fredrickson and the Constitution Drafting Project
In an episode on the Progressive Constitution, Zadek introduced 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 explained that the National Constitution Center, which he described as an organization funded by Congress and founded to promote study of the Constitution, brought together three teams of scholars — progressive, libertarian and conservative — each asked to rewrite the Constitution to reflect its values. Fredrickson was a member of the Progressive Team; Zadek noted that Timothy Sandefur had appeared two weeks earlier as a member of the Libertarian Team.
Fredrickson’s own contribution in the excerpt is limited to agreeing that it was a pleasure to be with Zadek. The substantive description of the project and of her role comes from Zadek’s introduction, not from her.
Across episodes
The three episodes do not argue the same question about Georgetown; they mention it in three unrelated contexts — Barnett’s legal scholarship, Tanner’s account of private reparations, and Fredrickson’s role on the Progressive Team — and the episodes show no development in how the university is treated from 2015 to 2021.