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97 Harv. L. Rev 4 (1983-1984)
Foreword: Nomos and Narrative

handle is hein.journals/hlr97 and id is 22 raw text is: THE SUPREME COURT 1982 TERM FOREWORD: NOMOS AND NARRATIVE Robert M. Cover* A. A violent order is disorder; and B. A great disorder is an order. These Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.) - Wallace Stevens' I. INTRODUCTION We inhabit a nomos - a normative universe. We constantly create and maintain a world of right and wrong, of lawful and unlawful, of valid and void.2 The student of law may come to identify the nor- mative world with the professional paraphernalia of social control. The rules and principles of justice, the formal institutions of the law, and the conventions of a social order are, indeed, important to that world; they are, however, but a small part of the normative universe that ought to claim our attention. No set of legal institutions or prescriptions exists apart from the narratives that locate it and give it meaning.3 For every constitution there is an epic, for each deca- logue a scripture.4 Once understood in the context of the narratives * Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and Legal History, Yale University. I wish to thank Boris Bittker, Robert Burt, Harlon Dalton, Mirjam Damaska, Perry Dane, Owen Fiss, Jack Getman, Paul Gewirtz, Michael Graetz, Henry Hansmann, Geoffrey Hazard, Leon Lipson, Jerry Mashaw, Peter Schuck, Avi Soifer, Harry Wellington, Stan Wheeler, and Steve Wizner for generous assistance at various stages in the preparation of this Foreword. I also profited from comments by many colleagues at a Yale Faculty work-in-progress session. I am indebted to Suhn-Kyoung Hong, Yale J.D. 1985, and to Elyn Saks, Yale J.D. 1986, for research assistance in the preparation of the Foreword. I IV. STEVENS, Connoisseur of Chaos, in THE COLLECTED POEMS OF WALLACE STEVENS 215 (i954). 2 On the idea of world building with its normative implications, see, for example, P. BERGER, THE SACRED CANOPY (1967); P. BERGER & T. LUCKMANN, THE SOCIAL CONSTRUC- TION OF REALITY (1966); J. GAGER, KINGDOM AND COMMUNITY (1975); K. MANNHEIM, IDE- OLOGY AND UTOPIA (1936); cf. P. BERGER, supra, at i9 & passim (invoking the idea of a nomos, or meaningful order). 3 I do not mean to imply that there is an official, privileged canon of narratives. Indeed, although some canons, like the Bible, integrate legal material with narrative texts, modern legal texts (with the possible exception of some court opinions) do not characteristically do so. It is the diffuse and unprivileged character of narrative in a modern world, together with the indispensability of narrative to the quest for meaning, that is a principal focus of this Foreword. 4 Prescriptive texts change their meaning with each new epic we choose to make relevant to them. Every version of the framing of the Constitution creates a new text in this sense. When the text proves unable to assimilate the meanings of new narratives that are nonetheless of constitutive significance, people do create new texts - they amend the Constitution. Thus, the

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