I have written this new Jurisprudence essay for Slate. It begins:

Unless you are a lawyer or a glutton for punishment, you probably want to avoid reading the new D.C. Circuit and 4^th Circuit opinions reaching conflicting results on the legality of key provisions of the Affordable Care Act—the parts that provide subsidies for Americans who sign up for health insurance through the exchanges the law created. The opinions are full of jargon parsing the intricacies of the mammoth health care law.

But well within the weeds of these lawyerly discussions is a more fundamental question: Is it the courts’ job to make laws work for the people, or to treat laws as arid linguistic puzzles?