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Narratives of Enlightenment 103

Narrative works as well beyond the boundaries of specific cases. Entire institutions of the law are based upon narrative constructions such as“the reasonable person” or“the hard-luck story,” and the effects of the story lines can be traced in appellate opinions, writings that are supposed to be dry exercises in formalistic legal reasoning.” Constitutional law, which necessarily involves argument over the fundamental political values of a society, is founded in“fictions” that, however contestable,“could not be eliminated without crippling the legal enterprise.” Even legal theory, which presents itself as abstract reasoning about jurisprudence, can be said to assume narrative visions of the world, so that each separate approach to the philosophy of law reflects perspectives about human nature that can be classified into literary categories.”! And in an oft-cited statement, Robert Cover memorably notes that the law of any community exists within a normative universe constructed by the narratives that“bespeak the range of the group’s commitments.”

We inhabit a nomos— a normative universe... 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. For every constitution there is an epic, for each decalogue a scripture. Once understood in the context of the narratives that give it meaning, law becomes not merely a system of rules be observed, but a world in which we live. In this normative world, law and narrative are inseparably related. Every prescription is insistent in its demand to be located in discourse— to be supplied with history and destiny, beginning and end, explanation and purpose. And every narrative is insistent in its demand for its prescriptive point, its moral.