This chapter considers how Severan jurists responded to political crisis. After describing the political dynamics that made jurists such important players in Severan administration, I discuss two rhetorical features of Severan juristic writing: Severan jurists’ tendency to describe jurisprudence in terms of its beneficial effects on the world rather than its elegance or internal morality, and their increasing use of anonymous citational forms like “emperors have written” rather than citing individual authorities by name. These maneuvers reconstructed imperial lawmaking as a static, impersonal field of knowledge and made interpretation, the job of the jurist, into the critical act that constituted Roman legality.