Religions > Atheism > Leonard Levy, 83, Expert on Constitutional History, Is Dead
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04 Sep 2006 10:08:08 AM |
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Leonard Levy, 83, Expert on Constitutional History, Is Dead |
Leonard Levy, 83, Expert on Constitutional History, Is Dead
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/01/obituaries/01levy.html?_r=2&ref=obituaries&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: September 1, 2006
Leonard W. Levy, an exacting, dogged, prolific and combative constitutional
historian whose work was frequently cited by the United States Supreme
Court and won him a Pulitzer Prize, died on Aug. 24 in Ashland, Ore. He was
83.
His death followed years of poor health and a recent stroke, said his wife,
Elyse.
Professor Levy’s Pulitzer, the 1969 prize for history, was awarded for his
“Origins of the Fifth Amendment.” He published almost 40 other books, on
topics including religious liberty, Thomas Jefferson and constitutional
interpretation.
But it was his work on the scope of the First Amendment’s protection of
free expression that gained the most attention. His “Legacy of Suppression:
Freedom of Speech and Press in Early American History,” published in 1960,
argued that the framers of the Constitution had had a crabbed view of press
freedom, limited largely to prohibiting prior censorship and perfectly
comfortable with subsequent punishment for speech they thought harmful,
including attacks on the government.
“I have been reluctantly forced to conclude,” Professor Levy wrote, “that
the generation which adopted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights did
not believe in a broad scope for freedom of expression, particularly in the
realm of politics.”
That assessment, at odds with the conventional wisdom, gave rise to
withering attacks on his work. Justice Hugo L. Black of the Supreme Court,
a First Amendment absolutist, wrote in a letter to a friend that the book
was “probably one of the most devastating blows that has been delivered
against civil liberty in America for a long time.”
But Professor Levy was capable of changing his mind. “He was scrupulously
honest and fair in his assessments of his own writings and other people’s
writings,” said Kenneth L. Karst, who collaborated with him in editing the
Encyclopedia of the American Constitution.
Indeed, Professor Levy revised “Legacy of Suppression” in 1985 and gave it
a telling new title: “Emergence of a Free Press.”
“Seldom has a major constitutional scholar reversed his field under such
brilliant light and with such a startling admission,” the broadcast
journalist and First Amendment authority Fred W. Friendly wrote at the
time.
Professor Levy beat a forthright retreat from some but hardly all of his
earlier conclusions. “I overdid it,” he said of the earlier version of the
book. “I had a novel position, which I overstated.”
His revised views were, he said, a result of an intense study of early
America’s newspapers, which he found contemptuously and scorchingly
critical of the government. He had been too focused on legal theory at the
expense of practical reality, he wrote.
“Freedom of the press,” he wrote in his revision, “meant that the press had
achieved a special status as an unofficial fourth branch of government.”
But he stood by what he called his principal thesis: that the framers had
not intended to outlaw libel suits and prosecution for criticism of the
government. Nor did he have anything kind to say about Justice Black, whom
he called “innocent of history when he did not distort it or invent it.”
Indeed, Professor Levy disdained judges on the right and the left who
molded history to their advantage. “They look for something to confirm a
hunch or to illustrate a point they have already decided on other grounds,”
he wrote in a 1988 book on constitutional interpretation. Professor Levy,
it may be important to say, was not a lawyer.
Leonard Williams Levy was born in Toronto on April 9, 1923. He earned
undergraduate and graduate degrees at Columbia University and taught at
Brandeis University and Claremont Graduate School. Other than his wife, he
is survived by two daughters, Wendy and Leslie, both of Ashland, and seven
grandchildren.
In 1986, Professor Levy published “The Establishment Clause: Religion and
the First Amendment,” a consideration of the extent of the constitutional
separation of church and state. His conclusion: “Robert Frost
notwithstanding, something there is that loves a wall.”
He was also an active participant in Reagan-era debates over a mode of
constitutional interpretation known as originalism, popularized by Attorney
General Edwin Meese III and Judge Robert H. Bork, whose nomination to the
Supreme Court was defeated in 1987. Originalism looks to the text and
original understanding of the Constitution as the only sure guide to its
meaning.
Professor Levy called that approach a disservice to the grand,
open-textured phrases in the Constitution, formulations that he said
required fresh interpretation by each new generation. “The framers,” he
wrote, “had a genius for studied imprecision.”
The New York Times Book Review picked his “Original Intent and the Framers’
Constitution” as one of the 16 best books of 1988, praising its “rigorous
scholarship and vigorous wit.” The book demonstrated, the editors wrote,
that “judges must go right on interpreting the spacious words of the
Constitution as they have always done.”
Professor Levy had a gloomy side, and he sometimes despaired over whether
his mountain of scholarship had had an impact.
The Supreme Court’s recognition of his books, for instance, gave him no
pleasure, he said in a 1980 interview published in Journalism History.
“Two of my books” — those on the Fifth and First Amendments — “have been
cited 10 or 12 times each and not once accurately, significantly or
responsibly,” he said. “If the court, or the justices of the court, botches
what I say in those books, how can I have contributed to any public
understanding? I haven’t.”
***************************************************************
You are invited to check out the following:
The Rise of the Theocratic States of America
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/theocracy.htm
American Theocrats - Past and Present
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/theocrats.htm
The Constitutional Principle: Separation of Church and State
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/index.html
[and to join the discussion group for the above site and/or Separation of
Church and State in general, listed below]
HRSepCnS · Hampton Roads [Virginia] SepChurch&State
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HRSepCnS/
[Its not just Hampton Roads folks who are members, there are members from
all over the US and a couple from overseas as well]
***************************************************************
.. . . You can't understand a phrase such as "Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion" by syllogistic reasoning. Words
take their meaning from social as well as textual contexts, which is why "a
page of history is worth a volume of logic." New York Trust Co. v. Eisner,
256 U.S. 345, 349, 41 S.Ct. 506, 507, 65 L.Ed. 963 (1921) (Holmes, J.).
Sherman v. Community Consol. Dist. 21, 980 F.2d 437, 445 (7th Cir. 1992)
.. . .
****************************************************************
USAF LT. COL (Ret) Buffman (Glen P. Goffin) wrote
"You pilot always into an unknown future;
facts are your only clue. Get the facts!"
That philosophy 'snipit' helped to get me, and my crew, through a good
many combat missions and far too many scary, inflight, emergencies.
It has also played a significant role in helping me to expose the
plethora of radical Christian propaganda and lies that we find at
almost every media turn.
*****************************************************************
THE CONSTITUTIONAL PRINCIPLE:
SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/index.html
****************************************************************
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