Books in Brief: License to Steal: The Forfeiture of Property

License to Steal: The Forfeiture of Property, by Leonard W. Levy (University of North Carolina, 288 pp., $29.95)

ASSET forfeiture has a sinister pedigree—indeed, one that can fairly be called un-American. Professor Leonard Levy of Claremont examines this emerging threat to property rights in this excellent new book. Levy explicates the two components of the government’s asset-forfeiture effort, civil and criminal (differentiated according to the type of legal proceeding required to effect them). Both components are a growing part of law enforcement in the United States. Civil forfeiture rests on the atavistic theory that inanimate objects can commit offenses against the sovereign. The underlying legal doctrine of deodands was the shabby medieval rationalization for royal plunder. (Yes, “deo-” refers to the allegedly divine authority of the government.) Civil forfeiture has great appeal to the modern law-enforcement agency: objects, unlike people, have no due-process rights. Once the government seizes property, the former owner has astonishingly scant means or hope of recovering it. Levy demonstrates that law-enforcement agents therefore now often find it easier and more lucrative to plunder the innocent than to punish the guilty. Criminal forfeiture—that is, forfeiture as a component of punishment following criminal conviction—offers due process to the citizen but also has an alien history. A hated element of British colonial rule, criminal forfeiture was so loathed by Americans that it was abolished by the First Congress in 1790. It remained in disrepute until it was casually disinterred in 1970 in two federal “anti-racketeering” statutes. Levy details how criminal forfeiture has since been abused as a threat against defendants. Society might well have been better off had it not been revived.

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James Higgins

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License to Steal: The Forfeiture of Property, by Leonard W. Levy (University of North Carolina, 288 pp., $29.95)

ASSET forfeiture has a sinister pedigree—indeed, one that can fairly be called un-American. Professor Leonard Levy of Claremont examines this emerging threat to property rights in this excellent new book. Levy explicates the two components of the government’s asset-forfeiture effort, civil and criminal (differentiated according to the type of legal proceeding required to effect them). Both components are a growing part of law enforcement in the United States. Civil forfeiture rests on the atavistic theory that inanimate objects can commit offenses against the sovereign. The underlying legal doctrine of deodands was the shabby medieval rationalization for royal plunder. (Yes, “deo-” refers to the allegedly divine authority of the government.) Civil forfeiture has great appeal to the modern law-enforcement agency: objects, unlike people, have no due-process rights. Once the government seizes property, the former owner has astonishingly scant means or hope of recovering it. Levy demonstrates that law-enforcement agents therefore now often find it easier and more lucrative to plunder the innocent than to punish the guilty. Criminal forfeiture—that is, forfeiture as a component of punishment following criminal conviction—offers due process to the citizen but also has an alien history. A hated element of British colonial rule, criminal forfeiture was so loathed by Americans that it was abolished by the First Congress in 1790. It remained in disrepute until it was casually disinterred in 1970 in two federal “anti-racketeering” statutes. Levy details how criminal forfeiture has since been abused as a threat against defendants. Society might well have been better off had it not been revived.