138 Mark Washofsky
some extracontextual, ahistorical, nonsituational reality, or rule, or law, or value” (Fish, 344) destabilizes disciplines such as history that contend to portray“the facts as they are”. The very fact that the historian narrates her subject, choosing which data to include and which to omit, determining the cause and effect relationships between them and privileging one set of accounts of an event over others leads some theorists to question the possibility of objectivity in the portrayal of the past. See Arthur C. Danto , Narration and Knowledge(New York: Columbia University Press , 1985) and Hayden White , Metahistory(Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press , 1975).
26. See Catherine Wells,“Situated Decisionmaking,” Southern California Law Review 63(1990) 1727-1746, and J. M. Balkin,“Ideology as Constraint,” Stanford Law Review 43(1991), 1150. These two articles emerge from two major movements within contemporary legal academia: Legal Pragmatism(Wells; her essay appears in a special symposium issue of the Southern California Law Review devoted to“The Renaissance of Pragmatism in American Legal Thought”) and Critical Legal Studies (Balkin).
27. As Clifford Geertz observes,“legal thought is constructive of social realities rather than merely reflective of them”; C. Geertz , Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology(New Haven : Yale University Press , 1983), 232.
28. Shulamit Almog ,“‘Galu'i Vekasu'i Belashon’:"Al Ketivatah Hashiputit shel Daliah Dorner,” Mehkerei Mishpat 22(2006), 43 1-444; the quotation is at 439.
29. David R. Papke,“Discharge as Denouement: Appreciating the Storytelling of Appellate Opinions,” Journal of Legal Education 40(1990), 145-159.
30. L. H. LaRue, Constitutional Law as Fiction: Narrative in the Rhetoric of Authority(University Park , PA : The Pennsylvania State University Press , 1995),
p. 8.
31. See Robin West ,“Jurisprudence as Narrative: An Aesthetic Analysis of Modern Legal Theory,” New York University Law Review 60(1985), 145-211.