Cover wrote on a number of subjects, including the relationship of violence to the law; the centrality of narrative to juridical structures, jurisgenerativity, and court decisions regarding slavery.
[1][2] Surviving family members included his wife Diane; his son Avidan, a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law; his daughter Leah; and his brother Arnold.
He was also interested in Jewish social and legal history, and at the time of his death he was translating a Renaissance Hebrew text on the law of jurisdiction.
From this it follows, that ...the rules and principles of justice, the formal institutions of the law, and the conventions of a social order are, indeed, important to that world; they are, however, but a small part of the normative universe that ought to claim our attention.
Legal interpretive acts signal and occasion the imposition of violence upon others: A judge articulates her understanding of a text, and as a result, somebody loses his freedom, his property, his children, even his life.
[3]Examines how judges in the antebellum era who personally opposed slavery nevertheless decided cases in favor of slave masters.
He also published the brief "Your Law-Baseball Quiz" on the editorial page of The New York Times on April 5, 1979, comparing Supreme Court justices to baseball players.