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CHOICE Review

A lawyer and prolific author, Peck offers a lively account of major questions involving the US Bill of Rights. The first half of the book traces the origins of the idea of rights in England and America, dramatically recounting the trials of William Penn, John Peter Zenger, John Wilkes, John Lilburne, and others that helped shape the common law origins of freedom of conscience, expression, due process and the exclusionary rule, and equal protection. Peck argues that a "common law" system of interpretation is preferable to a narrow search for the framers' intention. In the second half of the book, Peck examines a select number of American cases dealing with the rights whose origins he has explored, and acknowledges that no method can provide a fail-safe means of deciding concrete cases. Nicely formatted and reasonably priced, the book has ample footnotes, an index, and some useful appendixes, but no bibliography. A good companion to Ellen Alderman and Caroline Kennedy's In Our Defense: The Bill of Rights in Action (1991) and Kermit Hall's By and For the People: Constitutional Rights in American History (1991). Highly recommended for undergraduates and graduate students.-J. R. Vile, Middle Tennessee State University