Because judges can write 85 pages of very serious analysis on the constitutionality of moving a zipper on a jacket. See today's en banc Fourth Amendment decision by the DC Circuit in United States v. Askew. The en banc court ended up taking a different view than the original divided panel: My coverage of the panel opinion from April 2007 is here. There are some interesting conceptual issues in play here that I'll probably blog about next week, but for now I wanted to just flag the decision so everyone is up to date on the latest in zipper jurisprudence. Thanks to How Appealing for the link.