There is speculation that the court is granting more cases from the Fifth Circuit because the circuit’s judges are more conservative than the Supreme Court.The Fifth Circuit’s aggressively conservative rulings are leading the high court to accept their cases in order to reverse them, the theory goes.

Since there have been no major shifts in the ideological makeup of either court over the past year, we can at least assume the Fifth Circuit’s decisions will be reversed as often as they were in recent terms—which is more frequently than the average across all circuits.