Historians have engaged in a prolonged debate, that perhaps defies resolution, over the making of the Constitution. Were the framers enlightened, disinterested statesmen seeking to rescue a nation then drifting dangerously toward anarchy? Were they conspiratorial representatives of a rising financial and industrial capitalism? Was the Constitution primarily an economic or a political document? This collection of essays, by such renowned scholars as Charles Beard, Andrew C. McLaughlin, and John P. Roche, addresses the myriad questions that surround the creation of the principal document of the...

Leonard Levy's classic work examines the circumstances that led to the writing of the establishment clause of the First Amendment: 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. . . .' He argues that, contrary to popular belief, the framers of the Constitution intended to prohibit government aid to religion even on an impartial basis. He thus refutes the view of 'nonpreferentialists, ' who interpret the clause as allowing such aid provided that the assistance is not restricted to a preferred church.

For this new edition, Levy has added to his original arguments...

Leonard Levy traces the varied meanings of blasphemy throughout Western law. He argues that while past sanctions against the crime have inhibited all manner of cultural, political, scientific, and literary expression, we also pay a price for our extraordinary expansion of the scope of permissible speech. We have become, he charges, not only a free society but one that is 'numb' to outrage.

In the most controversial analysis ever written of the apostle of American liberty, the distinguished constitutional historian Leonard W. Levy examines Jefferson s record on civil liberties and finds it strikingly wanting. Clearing away the saintliness that surrounds the hero, Mr. Levy tries to understand why the unfamiliar Jefferson supported loyalty oaths; countenanced internment camps for political suspects; drafted a bill of attainder; urged prosecutions for seditious libel; condoned military despotism; used the Army to enforce laws in time of peace; censored reading; chose professors for...

For more than two hundred years a debate has raged between those who believe that jurists should follow the original intentions of the Founding Fathers and those who argue that the Constitution is a living document subject to interpretation by each succeeding generation. The controversy has flared anew in our own time as a facet of the battle between conservatives and liberals. In Original Intent and the Framers' Constitution, the distinguished constitutional scholar Leonard Levy cuts through the Gordian Knot of claim and counterclaim with an argument that is clear, logical, and compelling....

Trial by jury is the mainstay of the accusatorial system of criminal justice. Here one of our most distinguished constitutional scholars, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Leonard Levy, brings his formidable skills to bear in tracing the development of what many great legal minds have called the Palladium of Justice. Mr. Levy identifies the roots of trial by jury in the inquest, a medieval investigatory body whose members were sworn to tell the truth and whose verdicts of guilt or innocence were used by royal courts. From about 1376 the custom of requiring a unanimous verdict from twelve jurors...