Also on the weekend, I finished Origins of the Bill of Rights by Leonard W. Levy, first published in 1999, which I had been dipping into a chapter here or there when not reading about baseball or beer. I would recommend it to anyone interested in discussing the nature of rights whether in the US or not as the structure of rights in the western world relies heavily on what the leaders of the new USA in the late 1780s were thinking.

One of the interesting aspects of the book is the comparison of state constitutions to what became the Federal one. We often forget, even in Canada, that there is a mass of documents which form the constitution of a land - admit it...you forget. Another thing are the illustrations of the events and legal cases from the 1780s and before that they were reacting to in creating new formulations of rights such as "cruel and unusual punishment" - what the English Courts did to Puritan preachers around the time of the Mayflower is quite grotesque - or the bar on general warrants under which an agent of the state was empowered to just go around snooping or "freedom of the press" - which to the Founding Fathers only meant an unlicensed press which did not need previous permission from the government to print something and not the write to publish any statement you wanted. That last one only came about 20 or 30 years later and serves as one good example of what a load of hogwash interpretation based on on "the intention of the Founders" really is. No one really wants to live in the type of society which could be envisaged in 1780.

The book is well written, neutral in interpretation without getting bogged down in interpretation, without extensive footnotes or overly legalistic style so I would think anyone with an interest would be able to take it on and move to a new level of understanding. Next comes either a Ben Franklin bio or that book on the Anti-Federalists that makes me so sleepy.