Mark Washofsky

are commissioned to set aside existing rules at pleasure in favor of any other set of rules which they may hold to be expedient or wise.| mean that when they are called upon to say how far existing rules are to be extended or restricted, they must let the welfare of society fix the path, its direction and its distance. The conception of the welfare of society- what Shapiro calls“an overall view of which ruling will best serve the community”- is therefore not an extralegal factor at all. It serves along with such “legal” elements as logic, history, and custom as one of“the directive forces of our law.””” Indeed, it is the most decisive of these forces, for “when the social needs demand one settlement rather than another, there are times when we must bend symmetry, ignore history and sacrifice custom in the pursuit of other and larger ends.””® As Justice Haim Cohn summarizes Cardozo’s view: Culture, ethics, sociology, and economics are not to be defined as“poor cousins standing at the threshold” of“law.” Rules and statutes are nothing other than the mirror in which law finds its reflection; its substance and essence are hidden from view. All these disciplines enter law’s domain and are absorbed by it, to a greater or lesser extent. They are not distant relatives; they are the flesh of our flesh.”

We find much the same contention, though applied to a much broader canvas of human experience, in Robert Cover ’s famous

declaration that law can never be understood in isolation from its normative context and setting;*

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. The student of law may come to identify the normative 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. For every constitution there is an epic, for every decalogue a scripture. Once understood in the context of the narratives that give it meaning, law becomes not merely a system of rules to 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