One of the primary roles of judges is to interpret legal texts. These texts generally fall into three categories: statutes/constitutions (public law), contracts (private law), and judicial opinions (precedent/common law). For the first two of these textual buckets, judges have developed and often rely on interpretive canons in distilling legal meaning from the text. But for the third category of legal text—judicial opinions— interpretive frameworks are conspicuously underdeveloped. Why? Is it that the language of judicial opinions is so clear that the best reading is always obvious? Unlikely. How then can we explain why judges—so keen on establishing rigorous interpretive methodologies with regard to other legal texts—have declined to develop or apply similar methodologies for interpreting precedent?

This Article explores the dearth of well-developed interpretive methodologies for deciphering judicial opinions. It offers three key contributions. First, it introduces a novel comparative approach to the three categories of legal texts that lays bare the relative lack of consistent methodological rules for judicial opinions. Second, it outlines the few methodological rules that do exist for judicial opinions and suggests an approach to further development of precedential canons. Third and finally, it examines the root causes of the comparative underdevelopment of canons for precedential interpretation and considers whether the absence of rules in this context might serve institutional goals.