Leonard Levy

Leonard Williams Levy (April 9, 1923 – August 24, 2006) was an American historian, the Andrew W. Mellon All-Claremont Professor of Humanities and Chairman of the Graduate Faculty of History at Claremont Graduate School, California, who specialized in the history of basic American Constitutional freedoms. He was born in Toronto, Ontario, and educated at Columbia University, where his mentor for the Ph.D. degree was Henry Steele Commager. Levy's first book was a revision and expansion of his doctoral dissertation on Lemuel Shaw, chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The Law of the Commonwealth and Chief Justice Shaw was first published by Harvard University Press in 1957, and has regularly been reprinted. Levy's most honored book was his 1968 study Origins of the Fifth Amendment, focusing on the history of the privilege against self-incrimination. This book was awarded the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for History. He wrote almost forty other books, such as The Establishment Clause, Treason Against God: A History of the Offense of Blasphemy, Blasphemy: Verbal Offenses Against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie, and Religion and the First Amendment. He also was editor-in-chief of the four-volume Encyclopaedia of The American Constitution. In his 1999 Origins of the Bill of Rights he described the political background and intent of most of the amendments in the Bill of Rights. Levy's most controversial work focused on the early history of freedom of the press in colonial and revolutionary America. In 1960 he published Legacy of Suppression: Freedom of Speech and Press in Early American History, in which he argued that the law governing freedom of the press, and thus the original intention of the First Amendment's free-press clauses, was narrower than the generally libertarian views held by James Madison, and, in particular, that the law of freedom of the press included the old English common law crime of seditious libel. Levy's work challenged the preva