Narratives of Enlightenment 139
claiming a meaning for the story that he tells, the lawyer must make use of the existing body of cases, statutes, understandings, and rules that we call the law, which exists, before he organizes it into argument, simply as raw material for him and his adversary, full of obscurity and contradiction and uncertainty. In making his argument he revives and reorganizes— he reconstitutes— this cultural inheritance, creating a new version of it in competition with another mind.”
34. See Binder and Weisberg(note 19, above), 248:“Legal scholarship has always been prescriptive and has always addressed legal decision makers. A purely descriptive legal science is a chimera, at least in a pluralist democracy where the ultimate source of legal authority is always contestable.”
35. See, for example, Paul Gewirtz ,“Aeschylus” Law,” Harvard Law Review 101 (1988), 1043-1055, and Martha Nussbaum , Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life(Boston : Beacon Press , 1995).
36. This idea features prominently in the writings produced by these scholars. For good summaries of the point, see Baron(note 22, above), 262ff, and Richard Delgado ,“Storytelling for Oppositionists and Others: A Plea for Narrative,” Michigan Law Review 87(1989), 2412.
37. Kathryn Abrams,“Hearing the Call of Stories,” California Law Review 79 (1991), 971-1052.
38. A number of essays that model this sort of narrative jurisprudence are collected in the Symposium on Legal Storytelling, Michigan Law Review 87(1989), 20734. See as well Abrams(note 37, above); William N. Eskridge, Jr.“Gaylegal Narratives,” Stanford Law Review 46(1994) 607-646; Mari J. Matsuda ,“Looking to the Bottom: Critical Legal Studies and Reparations,” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 22(1987), 323-399; and Mary L Coombs,“Outsider Scholarship: The Law Review Stories,” University of Colorado Law Review 63 (1992), 683-716.
39. Which is not to say that the narrativists are incapable of writing good, standard legal scholarship. For a sampling of such articles, see Baron(note 23, above), 260, atn. 34,