The Establishment Clause: Religion and the First Amendment

Leonard W. Levy was a constitutional historian, and this University of North Carolina Press book is his standard academic legal history of the Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution's First Amendment, tracing its historical origins including the colonial precedents set in Rhode Island and Virginia before the clause's federal adoption. Its strength is close archival engagement with the actual colonial and founding era documentary record, tracing how specific state level religious liberty experiments fed into the federal clause's eventual wording, rather than reading the founders' intent backward from later case law. Its limit is exactly that focus on origins, it is a history of the founding period specifically, so a claim about how the Establishment Clause has been interpreted in later Supreme Court case law needs a separate source addressing that subsequent judicial history.