Kudos for #legal writing to #Judge Royce Lamberth, who starts off a new opinion with a literary bang. Writes the judge:

Picture a law written by James Joyce and edited by E.E. Cummings. Such is the Medicare statute, which has been described as 'among the most completely impenetrable texts within human experience.'

But Judge Lamberth, a Suits & Sentences favorite for the tang of his writing style, doesn't stop there. Puckishly, he includes, in the opinion in Catholic Health Initiatives v. Sibelius, this footnote elaborating the James Joyce reference:

The Court clarifies, however, that by making this analogy, it is referring not to Joyce’s early work, such as Dubliners or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but his later period, specifically Finnegan’s Wake.

As for Cummings, also a Suits & Sentences favorite, here's a taste of his editing style:

Buffalo Bill 's
defunct
            who used to
            ride a watersmooth-silver
                            stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
                                                                        
                            Jesus
he was a handsome man
                            and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

 Or perhaps, as some read the Obama administration's health care reform law:

and what I want to know is

how do you like your blueeyed boy

Mister Death Panel