In September 1961, nine-year-old Randy Barnett, lying on the family room floor of his parents’ modest home in the working-class Chicago suburb of Calumet City, was watching the CBS TV show The Defenders—about a father and son criminal defense team in New York City—when Randy exclaimed to his parents and younger brother, “When I grow up, I’m going to be a lawyer.” Why a lawyer? Because, he writes in his memoir, A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist (2024), “the practice of law is about justice.”

Barnett is now the Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, where he has taught since 2006 and where he directs the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. Unusual (perhaps unprecedented) for such a prominent law professor, before he began his teaching career he spent four years—as he recounts in a new second memoir published this year, Felony Review: Tales of True Crime and Corruption in Chicago—working as a big city prosecutor in the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office (CCSAO), which covers Chicago and many of its suburbs.

It is not possible here to do justice to all that is interesting and important in these two lively memoirs. So, I will focus on a few key events, themes, and issues that will likely be of most interest to CRB readers and that