| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Origins of the Bill of Rights. By Leonard W. Levy. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. xii, 306 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-300-07802-1.)

The debate over the meaning of the Bill of Rights is as contentious today as it was two hundred years ago. In his recent book, The Bill of Rights (1998), Akhil Amar asserts that the significance of the original Bill of Rights, as opposed to its transformation by the Fourteenth Amendment, was the protection of the collective rights of the people. Leonard W. Levy argues that its importance is in the identification and protection of individual liberties. 1

This book synthesizes the ideas and themes that Levy has articulated in his prodigious scholarly production over the past forty-three years. The format is straightforward: beginning with the British antecedents, he traces the colonial developments through the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791. Sometimes his analysis extends into the early national period; other times, to the present. Never one to suffer fools gladly or to find much praiseworthy in Thomas Jefferson's career, Levy provides an account that is characteristically opinionated, lively, and engaging. The only drawback is the absence of footnotes. . . .

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