Cover Work Research Articles

Dangerous Return: The Narratives of Jurisgenesis in Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun

Legal scholar Robert Cover's concept of jurisgenesis , the creation of legal meaning by polities, offers a revealing window into the historical prologues and dramatic action of William Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun . Cover's work clarifies how Faulkner's character Nancy Mannigoe, an African American domestic convicted of infanticide, exhibits a nomos , or normative vision, to rival that of Yoknapatawpha County's official legal system. The text, however, remains evasive about the imaginative sources of Nancy's nomos in the antinomian power of contemporaneous civil rights activity, whose spectacles of collective black political agency triggered a troubling form of censorship in Faulkner's artistic vision.

PORTFOLIO SELECTION AND ONLINE LEARNING

This paper studies a new strategy for selecting portfolios in the stock market. The strategy is inspired by two streams of previous work: (1) work on universalization of strategies for portfolio selection, which began with Thomas Cover's work on constant rebalanced portfolios, published in 1991,4 and (2) more general work on universalization of online algorithms,17,21,23,30 especially Vladimir Vovk's work on the aggregating algorithm and Markov switching strategies.32 The proposed investment strategy achieves asymptotically the same exponential rate of growth as the portfolio that turns out to be best expost in the long run and does not require any underlying statistical assumptions on the nature of the stock market.

In the Cause of Justice: Reflections on Robert Cover's Turn toward Narrative

The fabric of life was torn in a way I could not comprehend on the summer afternoon in 1986 when I learned that Robert Cover had died. In the midst of the shock, I recalled the special presence he brought to us at Hamline during a week's residency in October 1985. There was something very special, and difficult to name, in his quiet manner and depth of commitment, as he worked with us in colloquia and classrooms. He invited dialogue in a way that brought students to speak out of their experience, not simply out of their heads. I had heard of Cover's special classroom manner, but the experience of it spoke to me in a way that words could not duplicate. I came to see his writings in a new light. My mind then turned to the provocative work Cover embarked on in his 1983 article entitled Nomos and Narrative. What would become of that? Where might it have led him— and us along with him? Silence was all I had to offer in response. And yet, a thought kept occurring to me: beyond the imaginative character and analytical brilliance of Nomos, something else of significant importance was emerging in that work and those that followed. Did others sense it, or was I simply projecting onto Cover's work my own yearning for some respite from what seemed to be the desperation in recent legal scholarship?

Reflections on Capital Punishment: One Side of an Uncompleted Discussion

Bob Cover's work was, at the end, explicitly concerned with the law as an instrument of violence. Unsurprisingly, then, he addressed himself to the question of capital punishment. Surprisingly, though, he said “I am not an abolitionist” — surprisingly, that is, to those who understood that Cover was a radical in politics and who believed that because one touchstone of contemporary liberalism is opposition to the death penalty, radicals (who are however not liberals, after all) should support abolition of the death penalty. As Avi Soifer said, “We all are the worse for being unable to argue about that issue with Cover, and therefore to learn from him.” In this essay I want to think about why someone who is drawn to Cover's legal thought, as I am, might be inclined to take a similar position to his on the death penalty. I hasten to add, though, that I do not pretend here to represent Cover's thought; I have no idea why he was not an abolitionist, only why I am ambivalent about the death penalty. Nor do I have any reason to believe that the lines of argument that I will sketch here are ones that Cover would have found acceptable or even interesting.