Narratives of justice: Robert Cover’s moral creativity

ABSTRACT Robert Cover’s essay ‘Nomos and Narrative’ (1983) outlines a programme for an ambitious yet incomplete theory of law. While many interpreters focus on how it readdresses nomos, less attention is given to Cover’s notion of narrative. For Cover, narrative is not simply a complement to law that serves to pluralize it, but a key for a different conception of what law is, how it is constituted, and how it relates to sovereignty, morality and social commitment. In the context of the debates during the 1980s between legal positivists and naturalists, particularly around the question of hard cases, Cover’s contribution is that, instead of arguing about the different legal means required to fill what is perceived as a normative void, the narratival approach realizes that law is always socially and semantically contextualized. Hard cases, like crises of tradition or political breaking-points, are cases that uncover the working of narrative within law as a dynamic normative system. This paper argues that Cover’s work goes beyond the positivism-naturalism dilemma, as well as beyond the liberal framework of legal thinking and more broadly, towards a paradigm-shift in legal philosophy that I suggest calling poetical phronesis.