When the case was argued in April, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who joined the court in 2006, said there was no clear answer to the question. “Who wrote this statute?” he asked. “Somebody who takes pleasure out of pulling the wings off flies?”

“The one thing about this case that seems perfectly clear to me is that nobody who is not a lawyer, and no ordinary lawyer, could read these statutes and figure out what they are supposed to do,” Justice Alito said.

By that standard, Justice Gorsuch is no ordinary lawyer. In dissent, he said the answer was plain, as some kinds of cases belong in one court and other kinds in another. The seven-justice majority had gone astray, he said, in tweaking the statutory arrangement in the name of simplicity to arrive at the conclusion that the claims should all be brought in Federal District Court.

Then he made a larger point.

“If a statute needs repair,” Justice Gorsuch wrote, “there’s a constitutionally prescribed way to do it. It’s called legislation. To be sure, the demands of bicameralism and presentment are real, and the process can be protracted. But the difficulty of making new laws isn’t some bug in the constitutional design: It’s the point of the design, the better to preserve liberty.”

“Congress already wrote a perfectly good law,” he wrote. “I would follow it.”

Commentators wondered whether that vivid writing was a proportional response in a decidedly minor dispute.

“Dude, pick your spots,” Daniel Epps, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, said on First Mondays, an entertaining podcast that explores developments at the Supreme Court. “You don’t need to pull out all this stuff in every statutory case.”

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in a majority opinion joined by Justice Alito and five other members of the court, could barely be bothered to respond to her new colleague. The plaintiff in the case, she wrote, “asks us not to ‘tweak’ the statute, but to read it sensibly.”