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.1 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.2 Why, I ruminate here, did Bob delve repetitively into the pages of the text he always spoke of affectionately as "The Brothers?" I provide something of an answer in putting part of that novel together with part of the transcript of the recent trial of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd3--with occasional brief allusions to the O.J. Simpson trial of 1988. The focus is on the behavior of defense counsel, fictional and real; might the wild manipulation of reality introduced by The Brothers brilliant lawyer, Fetyukovich, have motivated Bob to crystallize misgivings about our system's epistemput differently--to find the pathway to legal accuracy and soundness that Bob insisted on during those long conversations, and during his lifetime generally? Do his favorite stories, including those he wrote about influentially, Billy Budd, Sailor4 and The Antigone,5 indicate that fictional novels, as ironic as it seems, almost uniquely provide a pathway to truthful outcomes, stories read and re-read, argued about, and integrated into a community that elevated them, Midrashically, into the status of law?6 Bob's taste in stories was highly selective, and it constantly invited him and his students to the table of Tanakh, Gemorrha, 5th Century Greek Tragedy, Melville, and the Russians. He made me an occasional guest at that table. At a 1981 Brandeis conference on "Terror in the Modern Age: The Vision of Literature, the Response of Law,"7 I first learned of his fascination with The Brothers. Illustration 1 is a photo taken at that conference8 where Bob and I are discussing, as I recall the moment, the defendant Dmitri Karamazov's terror at finding himself on trial for the murder of his father, a parricide that the reader of the novel already knows should be laid at the hands of his brother Ivan and his half-brother Smerdyakov, who are not in the dock. At that stage in our relationship, Bob knew that I was developing a manuscript about fiction writers' self-awareness when depicting in great detail lawyers, investigations, and trials, and the horror often felt by ordinary people in the face of error-prone narrative power.ological shakiness more generally? Is there a better way to resolve disputes, perhaps, or--Illustration 29 is a contemporaneous calendar marking for 1982 of the Cover family joining with mine at the beach in Guilford, Connecticut, where our conversations continued at low tide, feet in the Long Island Sound and tossing around a ball. Earlier that year, Bob had participated in what became a well-known Association of American Law Schools ("A.A.L.S.") session on Legal Interpretation that I had convened, which included Owen Fiss and Stanley Fish. At this conference, and elsewhere Bob signaled his lack of interest in the "turn" to interpretation--sometimes called Law as Literature.10 He and I never revisited, in private conversation, that component of the field of Law and Literature.11 The very next year, my calendar memorializes (Illustration 3) a crucial day for me in New Haven, when--typifying Bob's generosity to fellow scholars and his spiritual yearning for stories--he led me over to the office of Ellen Graham, the formidable literary editor of the Yale University Press.12 He was bringing to her my manuscript with the working title The Failure of the Word. Anciently, this was done in a cardboard box bearing pages of corrasable bond typing paper. Bob had read the manuscript, including significant chapters on Billy Budd, Sailor and The Brothers, and he wanted the Press to publish it, which (after peer review by law professors and Russian Literature scholars, among others) it was published.13 From his office to Ms. Graham's, we centered our thoughts on The Brothers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]