Legal decisions are very rarely read for pleasure. All too many judges feel that the majesty of the law needs to be protected with the barbed wire of rebarbative prose, prickly with forbidding jargon and headache-inducing abstraction. There have always been exceptions to this rule, judges who craft their words with brio, force, and wit, whose obiter dicta are rife with vernacular charm. This is the tradition of Supreme Court justices Benjamin Cardozo, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Robert Jackson. The one current justice who has the strongest claim to belong in this elite pantheon is Antonin Scalia.

As he proved once again in his peppery dissent in King v. Burwell, Scalia is the foremost living practitioner of performative legal prose, a masterful writer who can make torts tarty and judgments jazzy. Scalia’s dissent is full of the little touches that make his writing so delightful, such as the piquant slang (notably “jiggery-pokery” and “pure applesauce,” wonderfully quaint euphemisms for “bullshit”). Scalia’s dissent also gave voice to his familiar wrathful disdain for the pettifogging prose of his inferiors, as when he snorted, “Lawmakers sometimes repeat themselves—whether out of a desire to add emphasis, a sense of belt-and-suspenders caution, or a lawyerly penchant for doublets (aid and abet, cease and desist, null and void).”

Scalia’s reactionary jurisprudence has made him a polarizing figure, but the pungency of his writing is widely admired even by those who fear that he will return America to the dark ages. Writing in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy in 1993, Harvard law professor Charles Fried hailed Scalia as possessing “a natural talent” of “the kind which distinguishes a Mozart from a Salieri.” In the Journal of the Legal Writing Institute in 2003, Yury Kapgan claimed that Scalia’s decisions are “as close to literature as court opinions come.”