Ranters run amok

"Leonard Levy, in Ranters Run Amok, collects eight of his most important essays of recent years. These explorations into the history of the law are at once an entertainment and an education.". "Mr. Levy begins with a long essay on the Ranters, the ornery radicals who confronted the state and repudiated the moral law in mid-seventeenth-century England. He continues with anecdotes about Supreme Court justices and - a highlight of the book - a behind-the-scenes account of the deliberation over the Pulitzer Prizes in history. His chronicles of a long debate with Harvard University Press over the publication of his book on blasphemy is both eye-opening and confounding. He concludes with essays on the origins of the Fourth Amendment; on the critics of his prizewinning study of the Fifth Amendment; and on Lemuel Shaw, chief justice of Massachusetts from 1830 to 1860, whom Mr. Levy calls America's greatest magistrate."--BOOK JACKET.