About

Larry D. Barnett received a B.A. summa cum laude from the University of California at Los Angeles; an M.S. from Oregon State University; a Ph.D. in sociology from Florida State University; and a J.D. with Honors from the University of Florida. While on the faculty of the Widener University Delaware Law School (1978-2013), he was a Fulbright Scholar at Leiden University in The Netherlands (1979-80), an appointment that led him to found (and serve for eleven years as the editor-in-chief of) the demography journal Population Research and Policy Review. Articles in the Review are included in JSTOR, an online library whose coverage of currently published, English-language periodicals in the field of population studies is limited to about two dozen journals.

Professor Barnett’s scholarship has mainly focused on the sociology of law and on the growth of the human population. In the sociology of law, he has authored the books Roe and Dobbs in Context (Brill, 2025); Societal Stress and Law (Springer, 2023); the two-volume work Societal Agents in Law (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Explaining Law (Brill, 2015); The Place of Law (Transaction/Routledge, 2011); and Legal Construct, Social Concept (Aldine de Gruyter, 1993). On the numerical increase of the human species, he has written The Biosphere and Human Society (Bristol University Press, 2023); Demography and the Anthropocene (Springer, 2021); and Population Policy and the U.S. Constitution (Kluwer Nijhoff, 1982).