Ranters Run Amok: And Other Adventures in the History of the Law

by Leonard W. Levy

The Pulitzer Prize–winning constitutional historian Leonard Levy here collects eight of his most important essays of recent years. Written with his characteristic erudition, clarity, directness, and verve, these explorations into the history of the law are at once an entertainment and an education. Mr. Levy begins with a long essay on the Ranters, the ornery radicals who confronted the state and repudiated the moral law in mid-seventeenth-century England. He continues with anecdotes about Supreme Court justices and—a highlight of the book—a fascinating behind-the-scenes view of the deliberation over the Pulitzer Prizes. His chronicle of a long debate with Harvard University Press over the publication of his book on blasphemy is eye-opening and confounding. He concludes with essays on the origins of the Fourth Amendment; on the critics of his prize-winning study of the Fifth Amendment; and on Lemuel Shaw, chief justice of Massachusetts from 1830 to 1860, whom Mr. Levy calls America's greatest magistrate. Together these essays are continuing proof of Mr. Levy's unmatched powers in producing readable and important scholarship.

Hardcover

First published January 10, 2000

About the author

Leonard Williams Levy was the Andrew W. Mellon All-Claremont Professor of Humanities and Chairman of the Graduate Faculty of History at Claremont Graduate School, California. He was educated at Columbia University, where his mentor for the Ph.D. degree was Henry Steele Commager.

Levy's most honored book was his 1968 study Origins of the Fifth Amendment, focusing on the history of the privilege against self-incrimination. This book was awarded the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for History. He wrote almost forty other books.

In 1990, Levy was appointed a Distinguished Scholar in Residence; Adjunct Professor of History and Political Science at Southern Oregon State College in Ashland, Oregon.