While we're sitting on our hands waiting for the King v Burwell decison,read this columnon the legal philosophy that may factor into the final ruling.

The Affordable Care Act most likely met its fate on Friday, when the Justices of the Supreme Court met in conference, though we mere mortals won’t know what happened until nearly the Fourth of July.

So nothing written in the press at this point is likely to have any effect on the result. The inside-baseball chatter goes on, and this week it centers on two comments made from the bench by Justice Kennedy. They raise the prospect that Kennedy might decide the case for the government on the grounds that a victory for the challengers would raise constitutional problems.

Conservative supporters of the challenge seem a bit unnerved by that idea. But the spinning and counter-spinning now underway seems unlikely to have any effect. So let’s skip the internet call-and-response and instead use this dispute as a chance to explain an important but little-understood part of constitutional law: the Doctrine of Avoidance.

Ah ah ah! Don’t touch that mouse! When social conversation turns to “the avoidance doctrine,” lay people tend to stampede toward the exits. But if you’re interested in how courts deal with the Constitution, the idea is worth understanding; it surfaces over and over in important cases.

Let’s begin with one obvious but important fact: King v. Burwell isn’t a constitutional case. Only about a third of the Supreme Court’s cases, in fact, directly concern the Constitution. The rest require the Court to interpret rollicking federal statutes such as the Prison Litigation Reform Act, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, or the ever-popular Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act. Interpreting statutes, however dull they may be, is the heart of what twenty-first century courts do; they have developed an elaborate, and not entirely coherent, set of tools to do that.

Read the whole thing. It's pretty interesting.