(Bloomberg View) — Is it better to follow the strict letter of the law or to adjust it where appropriate to produce a more equitable result? This is one of the oldest questions in legal thought, one that can be traced back at least to Aristotle — and on Wednesday the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in, 5-4, on the side of equity, with Justice Anthony Kennedy providing the deciding vote.

Ordinarily, a decision like this one, involving the interpretation of the Federal Tort Claims Act would be of interest only to practitioners who are specialists in statutory interpretation. But this isn't an ordinary spring. In June, the Supreme Court will hand down its most important statutory interpretation case in a generation, essentially deciding whether the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will survive or fall. The interpretation question before the court in that high profile case, King v. Burwell, bears a striking structural resemblance to the obscure one the court decided Wednesday. And, not for the first time, Kennedy is the justice whose intentions we can't help trying to predict.

The technical issue before the justices in federal courts case, U.S. v. Kwai Fun Wong, had to do with what happens when a plaintiff who alleges that he's been injured by the government files suit after the statute of limitations has run its course. The law says, rather biblically, that a suit "shall be forever barred" if the plaintiff misses one of the required deadlines.