A License to Steal - by Leonard W Levy (Paperback)

About the Book

License to Steal: The Forfeiture of Property

Book Synopsis

Leonard Levy traces the development and implementation of forfeiture and contends that it is a questionable practice, which, because it is so often abused, serves only to undermine civil society. Arguing that civil forfeiture is unconstitutional, Levy provides examples of the victimization of innocent people and demonstrates that it has been used primarily against petty offienders rather than against its original targets, members of organized crime.

Review Quotes

"A License to Steal is a wonderful piece of scholarship. . . . Levy has identified an extremely important contemporary problem that has not come to the attention of the general public. . . . The book displays both Levy's capacity for exhaustive and discriminating scholarship and his penchant for incisive political critique. . . . It uses Levy's characteristically broad view of history to demonstrate the unfairness of recent criminal statuates which ease the government's burden in appropriating private property. . . . It has plenty of punch."--Stanley Katz, American Council of Learned Societies

"A tour de force of lively writing and keen historical interpretation. . . . This work is both an essential casebook and an outspoken, feisty, important study of the struggle for intellectual and religious liberties."--Publishers Weekly

"A valuable work on an important subject."--Appellate Practice Journal

"Leonard Levy, the legal historian who has written a number of highly regarded historical studies on various provisions of the United State Constitution, has added to his impressive oeuvre a new study of civil and criminal forfeiture. . . . The book provides a concise and entertaining summary of the historical origins of modern civil and criminal forfeiture in early English law."--Michigan Law Review

"Levy has made another important contribution to legal history. This cogent, carefully researched, and well-argued study . . . places historians and the public generally in his debt."--American Historical Review

"The best single source about the forfeiture question, from the history of the notion in English and American law, to the recent statutory develpments, and to the gross abuses by government."--Stephen M. Krason, Journal of Catholic Legal Studies

About the Author

Leonard W. Levy was Andrew W. Mellon All-Claremont Professor Emeritus of Humanities at the Claremont Graduate School and author of The Establishment Clause: Religion and the First Amendment and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Origins of the Fifth Amendment.