The Law as Bard: Extolling a Culture’s Virtues, Exposing Its Vices, and Telling Its Story

Adam MacLeod, Faulkner University

Article comments

This article will appear in the summer, 2008 symposium edition of the journal Jurisprudence.

Abstract

Our cultural forebears appointed a rather singular individual to preserve for their children a record of their values, rituals, institutions, and assumptions: the bard. The bard told stories drawn from the fabric of which his culture consisted. The bard’s stories, while entertaining, also served a much more lasting purpose, that of teaching, and in teaching, affirming, what choices his society valued. The bard extracted from his culture’s fabric samples representative of the whole. In short, the bard reinforced for his contemporaries and identified for his successors what choices and cultural commitments his society considered right and good.

A society’s laws function in much the same ways. The law contains a narrative, which has two aspects, (1) preservation of an account of human choices and cultural commitments, which reflects the culture’s values and (2) instruction that informs and shapes future choices. In other words, the law’s narrative preserves samples of a cultural fabric for the benefit of contemporary and future generations, and in turn teaches which individual and cultural choices are just.

One perceives from each law a glimpse of the culture from which the proposition emanates. One discerns the culture’s assumptions about life, relationship, sex, and family. One detects the culture’s values, the virtues that the culture lauds and the vices that the culture condemns. We would do well to consider what story our law tells of us and what it will teach future generations.