Contested terrain: challenging foundational narratives

The idea of the West, in theory and in practice, has shaped the way American law is practiced and judicial opinions are written. As discussed in Chapter 1, the context for American law and jurisprudence is the nomos, or the universe in which law functions. The nomos operates invisibly to deploy Western European ways of knowing (epistemology) and ways of being (ontology) through the reasoning and analytic processes that create and recreate the body of law. As an import to the United States, Western European epistemologies and ontologies manifest as the imperialist, capitalist, White supremacist blueprint for the U.S. and its legal system. The collective, social memory of the U.S., the active past that forms our identities and projects our group identity to the world, is a narrative of a country that begins with the arrival of White European immigrants seeking refuge from religious persecution. As expressed in the report commissioned by the 45th presidential administration (2016– 20) about the nation's political founding in 1776:

The preamble to the Constitution establishes it as a document written by “we the people, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”