Of course, Cover was not blind to the fact that some law-givers wield
the power of coercive violence. Indeed, Cover frequently sought to make
judges more aware of the violence they do, going so far as to say that judges
are inevitably “people of violence.”33 Cover argued that, “[b]ecause of the
violence they command, judges characteristically do not create law, but kill it.
Theirs is the jurispathic office.”34 In this vision, judges use the force of the
state to crush competing legal conceptions pushed by alternative normative
communities