But this neat solution didn’t meet Justice Kavanaugh’s need to use this case as an opportunity to expound on his theory of precedent to inoculate himself against criticism for overturning precedents that might pass his way in the future. Only overturning a real precedent this time would serve. So he used his separate opinion to explain why the “egregiously wrong” Apodaca decision was, in fact, a precedent that required overturning. Justice Sotomayor, a critic of many pro-prosecution criminal law precedents, also needed a real precedent to make her own point, in her solo separate opinion, that “while overruling precedent must be rare, this court should not shy away from correcting its errors where the right to avoid imprisonment pursuant to unconstitutional procedures hangs in the balance.”

At 26 pages, Justice Samuel Alito’s dissenting opinion, which the chief justice and Justice Elena Kagan joined, was the same length as Justice Gorsuch’s opinion. I have a feeling that it started out as the majority opinion, with Justices Ginsburg and Breyer onboard. Lacking proof, I’ll leave it to future Supreme Court historians to validate or debunk that theory. It’s an interesting enough opinion in its own right — remarkable, in fact, for its agreement with all the other justices that Apodaca was wrongly decided. Nonetheless, Justice Alito wrote, to overturn that precedent would be to leave Louisiana and Oregon facing a “potential tsunami of litigation” from those convicted by split juries who would seek new trials. He explained that the two states have “enormous reliance interests” in retaining systems that the Supreme Court had deemed constitutional.

Justice Alito was in an odd position to make such a point. His majority opinion two years ago in the Janus case, stripping public employee unions of the ability to collect a portion of dues from employees who chose not to join, was the culmination of a campaign that he had orchestrated to overturn a 41-year-old precedent that had deemed it constitutional to require such payments.

In the closing paragraphs of his Ramos dissent, he tried to explain the difference between adhering to Apodaca while overturning the labor precedent. Labor unions should not have relied on that precedent, he said, because “unions had been on notice for some time that the court had serious misgivings” about it. Justice Kagan, whose dissenting opinion in the Janus case contained some of the strongest writing of her years on the court, refused to sign this portion of Justice Alito’s Ramos dissent.

At the beginning of this column, I referred to the Supreme Court “in crisis.” What stands revealed in this puzzling bundle of opinions is not so much a court as nine individuals in pursuit of agendas far removed from the controversy they undertook to resolve. Remarkably, all nine agreed that the Apodaca decision, the continued validity of which they had recklessly put in play, had been a failure. But the real failure lies not in what the Supreme Court did in 1972 but in what it did this week, in its inability to provide a coherent answer to the question it chose to ask.

An obituary appeared in The Times last week for a 95-year-old former college professor named Darius Swann. As a young African-American father whose 6-year-old son was barred by race from attending a nearby public elementary school in Charlotte, N.C., Mr. Swann was the lead plaintiff in a case that led to a 1971 Supreme Court decision that authorized busing as a permissible remedy for courts to use to desegregate local school systems.

I mention this because the decision, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, one of the most important rulings during the era of resistance that followed Brown v. Board of Education, was unanimous. It didn’t start out that way. As the justices’ subsequently released papers revealed, and as Michael Graetz and I discussed in our book on the period, “The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right,” the decision started as a mess. Chief Justice Warren Burger, newly installed in office, was a reluctant participant in the project and was forced by his colleagues to go through seven drafts until he came up with an opinion that all would sign.