Among law students, lawyers, jurists, and legal academics, the reasoning contained in Supreme Court opinions forms the indispensable object of examination. The centrality of those opinions is instilled from the very first moments of law school, as professors direct their students to scrutinize this key paragraph, that critical sentence, even the odd momentous footnote. The rationales undergirding various Supreme Court opinions receive not mere study, but valorization, worship, and occasionally even ridicule.

Before beginning law school in 2001, I knew the names of an embarrassingly small number of judicial decisions. The only case names that I readily possessed were Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Bush v. Gore, and a smattering of other opinions that had managed to escape the narrow confines of the legal community. I did, however, know the name of at least one relatively obscure opinion…