How do state legislatures use statutory language to control policy implementation by state agencies? In this article, I consider—in a specific policy area and time period—the extent to which this decision is affected by legislative anticipation of the likely actions of state courts. Previous literature has argued that the legislative use of statutory language to control bureaucrats varies with the availability of nonstatutory methods of control, but it does not explicitly consider the potential role of courts. My expectations are derived from a simple formal model of executive–legislative relations and are supported when I test them using data on the number of words added to a state’s Medicaid laws from 1995 to 1996. In particular, I find that state legislatures write longer, more constraining, statutes when the likelihood that state courts intervene on their behalf is neither very high nor very low.