Issues in Legal Scholarship

Symposium: Robert M. Cover: Nomos and Narrative

Inaugurated January 2006

Introduction

Robert Cover's Nomos and Narrative pushes those who read it hard. It does not focus on discrete features of a legal system, as does, say, chapter two of Ronald Dworkin's TAKING RIGHTS SERIOUSLY (1977) (which pinned down 'the principle' like prey, and forced readers to see its legal significance). Instead, Nomos and Narrative encourages those who read it to see a system of law as nothing less than a "world." And each such world is identified by Cover as the product of a narrative that, at once, shapes, expresses, and may ultimately threaten the identity of those who live within it. Moreover, strands of Cover's essay lend support to the conclusion that he is, variously, a liberal, an anarchist, a positivist, and a natural lawyer.

For these reasons, Nomos and Narrative is hardly calculated to inculcate or encourage the formation of an orthodoxy. Rather, it does something at least as important. It encourages those who read it - or, perhaps more accurately, wrestle with it - to do the sort of thing that Michael Oakeshott saw as central to academic endeavour. That is, "to stretch [their] sails to the wind" (THE VOICE OF LIBERAL LEARNING: MICHAEL OAKESHOTT ON EDUCATION 127, et seq (1989)). Cover does this by urging his readers to explore the practices, institutions, and value conflicts that lend legal systems, and relations between legal systems, their distinctive character.

This is precisely what the contributors to this collection have sought to do. Thus, this symposium contains essays on narrative and the formation of English identity, law in communities that eschew violence, acute tension in relations between the United Kingdom and the European Union, the sublime and the beautiful as categories relevant to law, and the extent of law's responsiveness to cultural diversity. Moreover, as each of these contributions began to take shape, those preparing them found features of Nomos and Narrative obscure. For this reason, we invited a further contribution (from Dr. Thom Brooks) that dwells on some of the conceptual difficulties that lie in wait for those who read Nomos and Narrative.

Richard Mullender
Newcastle Law School
University of Newcastle
England

A copy of Nomos and Narrative is available here:

Nomos and Narrative