Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.2 | The History Cooperative

The Bill of Rights: Government Proscribed. Ed. by Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997. xii, 463 pp. $42.50, isbn 0-8139-1759-X.)

It is always difficult to write a review of an edited book. Space constraints make it impossible to say much, if anything, about the individual essays in a given collection. This is unfortunate, especially when each of the essays is outstanding, as it is in The Bill of Rights, a collection edited by Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert. Indeed, although Hoffman and Albert themselves do not contribute essays to the collection, they should be commended both for soliciting such superb contributions and for presenting them in a sequence that makes each read as if it was responding to the essay that preceded it. 1

The essays that open the collection—those by Lois G. Schwoerer, Donald S. Lutz, and Kenneth R. Bowling—trace the historical lineages of the Bill of Rights and describe the political context for its adoption by the states. The next three—those by Paul Finkelman, Saul Cornell, and Whitman H. Ridgway—examine how the bill was viewed during the ratification debate. The three essays that follow—those by Michael Lienesch, Akhil Reed Amar, and Forrest McDonald—discuss the significance of the Bill of Rights to the Founders and for us. The collection closes with an essay by Bernard Schwartz that compares the American and French experiences with bills of rights. . . .

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