Heretics in the temple

by David Ray Papke

Americans seem increasingly disenchanted with their legal system. In the wake of several high-profile trials, America's faith in legal authority appears profoundly shaken. And yet, as David Ray Papke shows in this dramatic and erudite tour of American history, many Americans have challenged and often rejected the rule of law since the earliest days of the country's founding. Papke traces the lineage of such legal heretics from nineteenth-century activists William Lloyd Garrison, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Eugene Debs up to more recent radicals such as the Black Panther Party and to the contemporary rejection of legal authority by various militia and anti-abortion movements.