Levy, Leonard W. A License to Steal: The Forfeiture of Property. Univ of North Carolina Press. November 1, 1995, 272 pages.
 The laws of forfeiture dictate that the government may confiscate property that has been assciated with the commission of a crime. In the 1970s and 1980s, law enforcement agencies increasingly used this controversial tactic and, as a result, reaped tremendous financial profit. In A License to Steal, Leonard W. Levy traces the development and implementation of forfeiture and contends that it is a questionable practice that, because it is so often abused, serves only to undermine civil society.
Levy addresses both criminal forfeiture, in which the loss of property is a penalty imposed after the conviction of the guilty party, and civil forfeiture, which operates on the perplexing legal premise that the property itself is guilty of an offense. Arguing that civil forfeiture is unconstitutional, Levy provides dramatic examples of the victiminzation of innocent people, most of whom cannot afford to contest the proceedings against them. Specifically , he demonstrates that forfeiture unjustly shifts the burden of proof to the property owner, who is in effect guilty until proven innocent; that it denies defendants the resources to retain legal counsel; and that it has been used primarily against petty offenders rather than against its original targets, members of organized crime.
"The best and most complete account to date of the controversy surrounding forfeiture of property as a device to combat crime. No one concerned with the current debate over property forfeiture can afford to ignore this provocative and important book."
-- James W. Ely, Jr., Vanderbilt University
"A License to Steal is a wonderful piece of scholarship...Levy has indentified 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 statutes which ease the government's burden in appropriating private property...It has plenty of punch."
-- Stanley Katz, American Council of Learned Societies
About the Author
Leonard W. Levy is Andrew W. Mellon All-Claremont Professor Emeritus of Humanities at the Claremont Graduate School and Distinguished Scholar at Southern Oregon State College. His books include Blasphemy: Verbal Offense against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie, The Establishment Clause: Religion and the First Amendment, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Orgins of the Fifth Amendment.
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