Robert Cover’s Love of Stories: A Rumination on His Wanting to Discuss the Brothers Karamazov With Me Across Five Conversations During the Last Five Years of His Life, With an Application to the Chauvin Murder Trial of 2021

Abstract

The field of Law and Literature, perhaps more than any other area of legal studies, has been touched deeply by Robert Cover’s life and work. My interactions with Bob over the last half dozen years of his tragically short life provide an insight, recounted in a somewhat personal vein here, into his profound engagement with stories, with the most enduring part of that revitalized inter-discipline. I specify and illustrate five conversations I had with him during conferences, family interactions, or long New Haven walks beginning in 1981 and ending the day before his untimely death in the Summer of 1986. On each occasion, Bob wanted to spin out ideas we were developing together about Dostoevsky’s last masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov (“The Brothers”), and in these pages, I want to engage the largest issues provoked in Bob’s mind by that text: law, religion, and the potential undermining of sound traditions through “revolutionary” interpretive distortions