Levy, Leonard W. 1923-2006
(Leonard Williams Levy)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born April 9, 1923, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada; died August 24, 2006, in Ashland, OR. Historian, educator, and author. Levy was a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and university professor best known for his scholarship of the U.S. Constitution. A graduate of Columbia University, he earned a doctorate there in 1951. Levy quickly joined the Brandeis University faculty, where he was named Earl Warren Professor of American Constitutional History in 1958. He also served at various times as dean of the graduate school of arts and sciences, associate dean of faculty, chair of the history department, and chair of the graduate program in the history of American civilization. While at Brandeis, Levy won the Pulitzer for Origins of the Fifth Amendment: The Right against Self-Incrimination (1968). Before this achievement, however, he had stirred controversy with his 1960 title, Legacy of Suppression: Freedom of Speech and Press in Early American History, in which he averred that the framers of the Constitution had not intended the press to have as much freedom of speech as journalists now enjoy. Indeed, Levy maintained, the founding fathers believed newspapers could be punished for publishing stories that were detrimental to the U.S. government. A number of Levy's colleagues protested this opinion, and in 1985 Levy concurred that he had been too extreme in his original presentation. He revised the book with a new subtitle as Legacy of Suppression: Emergence of a Free Press. After leaving Brandeis in 1970, Levy was hired as a history professor at Claremont Graduate School in California. There he chaired the graduate faculty of history from 1974 to 1990, the year he retired as professor emeritus. During the 1980s, Levy was active in political debates about the First and Fifth Amendments and was particularly stringent in his attacks against a concept known as originalism. This theory stated that the Constitution should only be read according to the original intentions of its writers, leaving no leeway for future interpretation or evolving societal circumstances. Levy's writings were often cited by U.S. Supreme Court justices and other judges, but the scholar lamented that their readings of his works were often erroneous, and he despaired that all his books would have little or no impact on the American legal system. Among his other works are Against the Law: The Nixon Court and Criminal Justice (1974), Original Intent and the Framers' Constitution (1988), A License to Steal: The Forfeiture of Property (1996), and the more recent A Bookish Life (2003), The Bill of Rights (2004), The Fourth Amendment (2004), and Facets of Freedom (2004). He was also a prolific book editor, as well as editor in chief of the sixty-volume The American Heritage Series: A Documentary History of the United States, the forty-volume The Harper Documentary History of Western Civilization, and the twenty-volume Contemporary Essays.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

New York Times, September 1, 2006, p. C11.

Washington Post, September 23, 2006, p. B13.