Last Thursday's United States Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Elections Commission has brought forth a torrent of questions, anguish, and anger. Citizens United is one of those every-so-often decisions that reminds us of the importance and unique power of the non-elected judicial branch.

Your Slog Senior Legal Analysts made our debut on this august forum Friday with a knee-jerk negative response to Citizens United. Because we are lawyers and lawyers are fair, we told you we’d be back after reading the opinion of the Court, as well as the accompanying concurrences and dissents. At that point, presumably, we’d have something intelligent to say. Because we are lawyers and lawyers keep their commitments, we (well, one of us) slogged (get it?) through the opinion—183 pages long—over the weekend, and are now completely informed and on top of it. And amazed, but not in a good way.

We're going to point out some interesting things about the opinion over the coming week. We’ll comment on the remarkable and cranky dialogue between the majority opinion (written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, with his chorus of concurring cheerleaders Justices Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas) and the lengthy dissent (by Justice John Paul Stevens). And we’ll unearth the ominous tidings that lurk not very far below the surface of the concurring opinions—well, ominous if you care about the issues of our time, such as the future of Roe v. Wade.

If you want to download and read Citizens United for yourself, go for it. These pages—like many Supreme Court decisions—are tough sledding. Citizens United is a thicket of long sentences, mind-bending abstraction, and words used in ways you've not seen before. Not to mention the endless citations and footnotes everywhere. (Anyone who has read more than a few Supreme Court opinions knows that all the fun is in the footnotes.) Still, taking on Citizens United is not the worst thing you could do. It is possible to feel upset and moved while reading this case. And there’s a special poignancy in Justice Stevens’s dissent, a sense that this near-lion is not just irked but, somewhere very near the end of his long run, deeply disappointed and dismayed by his conservative colleagues and the direction this Court has taken.