The three-sentence order did not directly concern Judge Kavanaugh. He and his newest colleague on the appeals court, Gregory Katsas, “did not participate in this matter,” a footnote informs us. The court’s other nine judges did, and all agreed not to grant an unusual request to hear, as a full court (en banc in legal terminology), an appeal brought on behalf of a Guantánamo detainee named Khalid Ahmed Qassim. Such a request typically comes after a three-judge panel has heard an appeal, but Mr. Qassim’s lawyers sought to skip that step, deeming it futile.

Mr. Qassim, a 41-year-old Yemeni, is one of Guantánamo “forever prisoners,” having been held without charge for 16 years. He filed a habeas corpus petition in Federal District Court in Washington, D.C. in July 2004, shortly after the Supreme Court ruled in Rasul v. Bush that, contrary to the government’s argument, federal judges had jurisdiction to hear such cases from Guantánamo inmates. Mr. Qassim’s petition, along with others, was kept in abeyance as cases that would inevitably bear on it traveled up and down the legal system. Finally, in May, a federal district judge, Thomas F. Hogan, denied the petition in a brief oral ruling. Binding precedent of the circuit left him no choice, the judge said.

“Judge Hogan was correct that panel decisions of this court prevented him from granting relief to Mr. Qassim,” the detainee’s lawyers told the appeals court’s judges. And here is the link to Judge Kavanaugh. The lawyers cited four D.C. Circuit decisions that they say have flouted the Supreme Court’s holding in Boumediene v. Bush, the 2008 decision that recognized a constitutional right — not simply a statutory right, as in the earlier Rasul case — for Guantánamo inmates to seek federal court review of the legality of their detention. The four decisions, the lawyers asserted, have left Mr. Qassim and others at Guantánamo “caught in a trap from which they cannot escape based on rules set by panels of this court that are directly contrary to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Boumediene.” Under federal court practice, panels within an appeals court must accept each others’ decisions as binding, unless and until the full court announces a change of course. The Qassim case will now go to an ordinary three-judge panel, which may send it back to Judge Hogan for additional fact-finding in advance of a renewed appeal.

Judge Kavanaugh did not write an opinion in any of the four cases. But he was a member of the panels that decided two of them, both in 2010, by 3-to-0 votes. One, Al-Bihani v. Obama, upheld the denial of habeas corpus for Ghaleb Al-Bihani, a Yemeni who claimed that before 9/11 he was merely a cook for a group in Afghanistan allied with the Taliban’s fight against the Northern Alliance. This support for the Taliban was sufficient to justify his continued detention, the panel held in an opinion by Judge Janice Rogers Brown. Wherever the outer bounds of material support lie, Judge Brown wrote, “they clearly include traditional food operations essential to a fighting force and the carrying of arms.” (A government review board approved Mr. Al-Bihani’s release in 2014, and he was transferred to Oman.)