Levine on Law and Redemption: Expounding and Expanding Robert Cover's Nomos and Narrative @TouroLawCenter

Samuel J. Levine, Touro University Law Center, has published Law and Redemption: Expounding and Expanding Robert Cover’s Nomos and Narrative at 34 Yale J. L. & Human. 253 (2023). Here is the abstract.

The article explores two interrelated themes that distinguish much of Robert Cover’s scholarship: Cover’s reliance on Jewish sources and his efforts to redeem American law and constitutionalism. These themes figure most famously, and in some ways most notably, in Cover’s groundbreaking Nomos and Narrative, published in 1983 and widely considered among the most significant law review articles ever written. Though less well-known, Cover’s unfinished and posthumously published book chapter, Bringing the Messiah Through the Law: A Case Study, expands upon these themes, relying more directly on Jewish law and legal history to illuminate Cover’s conceptions of legal redemption. The Article maintains that, taken together, these two pieces provide complementary views of Cover’s approach, demonstrating, at once, both the potential and the limitations of the redemptive power of law within the American legal system. The article begins with a close reading of Nomos and Narrative, noting Cover’s disappointment with American law’s failure to implement a redemptive response to the legal and societal wrongs of slavery and racial discrimination. The article then turns to Bringing the Messiah, which extends and applies Cover’s vision of law as a bridge to an alternative future, considered through the express lens of Jewish legal history. The article further examines the redemptive and transformative power of law in the context of both legal and narrative areas of Jewish tradition, suggesting that the law must acknowledge and respond to the faults of the past to allow for repentance and reconstruction toward a redeemed future. Finally, the Article closes with the proposition that perhaps Cover’s frustration with the redemptive failure of the American legal system reflects a failure of American law and society to undertake a full accounting of collective culpability for past wrongs, leaving unfulfilled a prerequisite for reconciliation, reconstruction, and redemption.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.