After Amy Coney Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg onthe Supreme Court last fall, plenty of court watchers assumed that the bench would start churning out an endless line of conservative opinions. But that didn’t happen. While there were some conservative wins—most notably on the limits of the Voting Rights Act and unionizing—this past term was far more notable for all the sweeping conservative opinions that never came.

With six Republican appointees on the court, why aren’t we seeing the consistent conservative outcomes that the right cheered for and the left warned of?

The answer lies with the two-dimensional nature of the Supreme Court. Many court watchers are still plotting the justices along a single, horizontal axis of legally conservative to legally liberal. And they are left reaching for increasingly head-scratching explanations for why a justice like Brett Kavanaugh—with a long history of conservative opinions from his days as a lower court judge—can find himself often siding with someone who is quite liberal, or against another justice just as conservative.

But when it comes to the Supreme Court, […]