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

Ostensibly a collection of miscellaneous essays on legal history, this latest from legal historian Levy is an often unintentionally amusing account of academic infighting. In 1969, Levy's Origins of the Fifth Amendment won the Pulitzer Prize in history, ""making it an attractive target for critics."" Here he settles accounts with anyone who criticized that book as well as several others written in his long career. He cites his critics by name, eviscerating them for their deceptiveness, irrelevance and sarcasm, their tendency to ""attack"" him, to ""persistently misrepresent [him], even on trivial matters"" and to misspell his name. In one astonishing chapter, he recounts how Harvard University Press, ""whor[ing] after a best-seller,"" initially rejected his manuscript on the history of blasphemy. After two eminent readers of his own choosing submitted negative critiques, an enraged Levy wrote HUP a bilious, defensive 13-page letter, which he produces here in full (""I am an amateur, but I do not think I'm incompetent. Nor do I believe that I am unfair or prejudiced. I suspect that my reader is unfair to me. But I'm used to that sort of reaction""). Most of the rest of this volume consists of straightforward, densely detailed essays on the historical context of the Fourth Amendment, the published opinions of Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw and the 17th-century English religious anarchists known as ""Ranters."" Accomplished though they are, these chapters seem like afterthoughts in a work devoted mainly to airing personal grievances 30 years old. (Apr.)