Robert Cover

Robert Cover (July 30, 1943 – July 1986) was a law professor, scholar, and activist, teaching at Yale Law School from 1972 until his untimely death at age 42 in 1986. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1943. He attended Princeton University and Columbia Law School. His most noted works include Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process, "Violence and the Word," and "Nomos and Narrative." He lent his strong support to the campaign to divest Yale of apartheid South African financial holdings. He was also interested in Jewish social and legal history, and was translating a renaissance Hebrew text on the law of jurisdiction at the time of his death. Prior to his death from heart problems, many friends and colleagues speculated that, given his extraordinary success at such a young age, he would one day be considered for the Supreme Court.

In "Nomos and Narrative", he tells that "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". He explains that the normative universe is held together by the force of interpretive commitments - some small and private, others immense and public. These commitments - of officials and of others - do determine what law means and what law shall be. If there existed two legal orders with identical legal precepts and identical, predictable patterns of public force, they would nonetheless differ essentially in meaning if, in one of the orders, the precepts were universally venerated while in the other they were regarded by many as fundamentally unjust. Therefore "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 to be observed, but a world in which we live".

...
Wikipedia