Anyone who made it through a week of law school knows it to be an undeniable fact that not all judicial opinions are made equal. Some are tedious models of opacity. Others, through their authors' writerly skill, soar off the page.

But perhaps there's a third category: those that are short, direct, and written without a surfeit of footnotes or words that sound ripped from the headlines -- in the age of Nero. Those, frankly, might be our favorites -- the ones that get in there and go, without citing dozens of cases, without...