Out of Order: The Challenge of Outsider Jurisprudence and Eudora Welty’s (Extra)Legal Vision to the American Rule of Law

Canadian Review of American Studies 1992 Special Issue, Part I 117 Out of Order: The Challenge of Outsider Jurisprudence and Eudora Welty's (Extra)Legal Vision to the American Rule of Law Eve Kornfeld What we saw last night and the night before in Los Angeles is not about civil rights. It's not about the great cause of equality that all Americans must uphold .... It's been the brutality of a mob, pure and simple .... What is going on in L.A. must and will stop. As your president, I guarantee you, this violence will end. And now, let's talk about the beating of Rodney King, because beyond the urgent need to restore order is the second issue, the question of justice, whether Rodney King's federal civil rights were violated .... Federal grand jury action is underway today in Los Angeles .... The federal effort in this case will be expeditious and it will be fair. It will not [be] driven by mob violence, but by respect for due process and the rule of law. (George Bush, 1 May 1992)1 In the 1960s, in my home town of Jackson, the civilrights leader Medgar Evers was murdered one night in darkness, and I wrote a story that same night about the murderer . . . . But all that absorbed me, . . . was the necessity I felt for entering into the mind and inside the skin of a character who could hardly have been more alien or repugnant to me. Trying for my utmost, I wrote it in the first person. I was wholly vaunting the prerogative of the short-story writer. It is alwaysvaunting ... to imagine yourself inside another person, but it is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose. (Eudora Welty 1984,38-39)2 118 Canadian Review of American Studies In May 1992,President George Bush responded to the riots which followed the acquittal of those Los Angeles policemen charged with beating the African-American motorist Rodney King, by insisting upon the restoration of order and by invoking the concept of the "rule of law." Indeed, Bush represented the two impulses as fundamentally linked: "You must understand that our system of justice provides for the peaceful, orderly means of addressing this frustration. We must respect the process of law, whether or not we agree with the outcome." The American rule of law, he argued, rendered all of the extralegal actions taken in Los Angeles both out of order and unnecessary. One of the founding myths of the dominant American culture , the concept of the rule of law still resonates strongly and broadly in late-twentieth-century America. Many outraged Americans of conservative to liberal persuasions found themselves in basic agreement with their president in support of the American rule of law, whatever they held the underlying economic or moral causes of the riots to be. Yet recently, some legal scholars have issued a complex challenge to the concept of the rule of law.Pointing to precisely the kinds of unequal justice and perceptual divides that the Los Angeles acquittal represents, these scholars (manyof whom are women or men of colour) question the historical and contemporary objectivityor neutrality of American law. Rather, they view American legal history as a series of gendered and racially marked contests of power, unequally joined. American legal contests always involve the telling of stories, they observe, but not all stories have been or can be heard. Thus, these critics of the American rule of law have turned to analyses of the interconnections between the politics of narrative and the social construction of legal meaning and power. As advocates of a new "outsider jurisprudence," they seek empowerment for traditional outsiders through disorderly, alternative legal narratives. They hope that the attractions of narrative itself might help to create a new sense of empathy across class, race, and gender boundaries, and that many dominant Americans will move beyond the comfortable abstractions of the rule of law and join Eudora Welty in her efforts to enter "into the mind and inside the skin" of people traditionally alien or even repugnant to them. This essay will explore the...