It is a routine charge against contemporary judicial opinions that they read more like statutes than like opinions of a court. According to the typical formulation of the charge, the modern judicial opinion, especially the modern Supreme Court constitutional opinion, is excessively divided into sections and subsections, relies too heavily on three-part tests, is overly footnoted, cannot be understood by nonspecialists, is uninteresting to read even for specialists, and is devoid of anything even remotely resembling literary style. Implicit in the charge, of course, is that there is something wrong with this state of affairs, and that judicial opinions resembling the Securities Act of 1933, the Internal Revenue Code, or the regulations of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration are for that reason deserving of all the scorn they receive at the hands of contemporary commentators. Yet those same commentators typically fail to castigate OSHA regulations as uninteresting, do not worry about the lack of literary style in the Internal Revenue Code, and are reluctant to complain about the intricate scheme of exceptions, definitions, parts, and subparts in the Securities Act of 1933. So it appears that the complaint is not that there is something intrinsically wrong with nonliterary complexity in legal items. Rather, the complaint presupposes that the judicial opinion is a legal item-a legal performance-of a special sort, one in which the features expected in statutes should largely be absent, and in which the features often detrimental to the effective operation of a statute or administrative regulation-literary flair, for example-are generally to be encouraged. I want to challenge this presupposition, one that marks a profound difference between statutes and judicial opinions. The