The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2018-2019 term will be remembered as Brett M. Kavanaugh’s first one as a justice, and he wrote the majority opinion in the only case that the Supreme Court affirmed on direct review from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit this past term. In the other two cases that reached the Supreme Court directly from the Third Circuit last term, the high court vacated the Third Circuit’s judgments and remanded the cases. Yet in one of those two cases, the Supreme Court did so only after overturning its own precedent by the slimmest of margins, and the Third Circuit court had properly followed then-existing Supreme Court precedent in reaching the result that the Supreme Court ultimately overturned. Thus, one can endlessly debate whether the Third Circuit’s record on direct review last term should more properly be regarded as 1-2 or 2-1.

In another six cases, the Supreme Court expressly noted that it was resolving conflicts that involved the Third Circuit. There, the Supreme Court agreed with the Third Circuit three times and disagreed with it three times. As a result, the Third Circuit’s overall approval rate this past term was either 44% or 56%, depending on how you characterize the case on direct review in which the Supreme Court overruled itself. Either way, the Third Circuit’s success rate at the Supreme Court during the 2018-2019 term was better than in many recent years.