Every lawyer remembers the unpleasant rite of passage that is taking the LSAT, the standardized test for law school admissions. The most distinctive component of the LSAT is known colloquially as the “logic games” section (though its formal name is “analytical reasoning”). This section, full of hypothetical dinner parties with picky guests and distinctive seating requirements, is meant to test the ability of future lawyers to apply the types of overlapping and interacting rules that we often must untangle to apply the law.

A much-simplified version of the type of question one might see in the logic games section is as follows: A restaurant calls its happy hour menu the “5:00 PM and after” menu, but the menu is actually available up to an hour before 5:00 pm as well as up to an hour after 5:00 PM. Yesterday, John ordered off the “5:00 PM and after” menu. Today, John ordered at the same restaurant an hour earlier than he did yesterday. Was the happy hour menu necessarily available when John ordered today?

If you answered “no,” you just successfully avoided a logical fallacy that multiple federal courts of appeals had fallen victim to, before finally being corrected by the Supreme Court yesterday. The history of these decisions is a case study in how flimsy logic and basic errors can be perpetuated by too much deference to precedent, as well as (perhaps) some motivated reasoning.

Yesterday’s decision in United States v. Taylor concerned whether attempted robbery under federal law qualifies as a “crime of violence.” If it does, then using a gun during that attempted robbery can result in a second conviction and a longer sentence.

The relevant law defines a “crime of violence” as a crime that “has as an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force.” Because the law’s text requires that at least one of these three options must be “an element” of the crime, the Supreme Court has previously held that a “crime of violence” must be a crime that involves at least one of these options in every single case. This approach, known as the “categorical approach,” asks whether conviction of a crime necessarily requires that the defendant must have performed at least one of these options. In other words, if it is logically possible to be convicted of a crime without using, attempting to use, or threatening to use physical force, then that crime is not a “crime of violence.”

The defendant in yesterday’s case had been convicted of attempting to commit robbery under a federal law called the Hobbs Act (references to “robbery” in the remainder of this piece will mean robbery as defined in the Hobbs Act). That law defines completed robbery as unlawfully taking personal property “by means of actual or threatened force.” There is thus little doubt that completed robbery qualifies as a crime of violence: to be convicted of robbery, a person must either use or threaten force. Thus, it is logically certain that every person convicted of completed robbery must have been found to have committed at least one of the three options for a “crime of violence.”

But what about a person only convicted of attempted robbery? Such a person, under the relevant law, has intended to commit robbery and taken a substantial step toward committing robbery, but failed to complete the robbery. And since robbery itself can be accomplished by either “actual” or “threatened” force, attempted robbery can be accomplished by attempting to commit either “actual” or “threatened” force.

In those cases where the attempted robbery consists of an attempt to commit actual force, the crime of course involves the attempted use of physical force, which is one of the three options for a crime of violence. But what about the other possibility, those cases where the attempted robbery consists of an attempt to commit threatened force? As the Supreme Court explained yesterday, that possibility does not entail any of the three options for a “crime of violence,” which means attempted robbery itself cannot qualify as a crime of violence.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing the opinion of the Court and joined by six other justices, laid out a simple hypothetical to show why:

Suppose Adam tells a friend that he is planning to rob a particular store on a particular date. He then sets about researching the business’s security measures, layout, and the time of day when its cash registers are at their fullest. He buys a ski mask, plots his escape route, and recruits his brother to drive the getaway car. Finally, he drafts a note—“Your money or your life”—that he plans to pass to the cashier. The note is a bluff, but Adam hopes its implication that he is armed and dangerous will elicit a compliant response. When the day finally comes and Adam crosses the threshold into the store, the police immediately arrest him. It turns out Adam’s friend tipped them off.

In such a case, Adam is guilty of attempted robbery because he attempted to threaten the cashier for money. But “Adam did not ‘use’ physical force. He did not ‘attempt’ to use such force—his note was a bluff and never delivered. And he never even got to the point of threatening the use of force against anyone or anything. He may have intended and attempted to do just that, but he failed.”

Put simply, a failed attempt to threaten force is itself neither an attempt to use force nor a threat to use force. And so attempted robbery cannot be a crime of violence under the categorical approach. Indeed, even the two dissenting justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, did not dispute this point. Rather, they each contested the premise as to whether the categorical approach (as currently defined) is in fact the best approach to applying the statute. None of the nine justices disputed that under the categorical approach as it has been previously defined, attempted robbery cannot qualify as a crime of violence.

Yet remarkably, three federal appellate courts in a row had held just the opposite, until the Fourth Circuit finally became the first federal appellate court to reach the same conclusion that the Supreme Court would later affirm. Each of those three appellate courts, the Eleventh, Seventh, and Ninth Circuits, had held that because completed robbery itself is a crime of violence, attempted robbery must entail the attempted use of force. The Eleventh Circuit, the first to reach this conclusion, reasoned that “a completed Hobbs Act robbery itself qualifies as a crime of violence … and, therefore, attempt to commit Hobbs Act robbery requires that [the defendant] intended to commit every element of Hobbs Act robbery, including the taking of property in a forcible manner.” The Seventh and Ninth Circuits later followed this reasoning to reach the same result.

This is an error as basic as failing the logic puzzle at the start of this piece. Even though the happy hour menu is called the “5:00 PM and after” menu, it is available as early as 4:00. Its mere name does not mean John actually ordered at 5:00 PM or later yesterday. And since John might have ordered as early as 4:00 yesterday, he might have ordered as early as 3:00 today, before the happy hour menu was available.

Similarly, despite the name, not every crime of violence actually involves the use of violence. Indeed, courts know that crimes of violence don’t necessarily entail the use of violence when they perform the categorical approach and apply its three-pronged definition. Yet immediately after performing this test, the same court can seemingly forget this definition and act as if, based on the name, all crimes of violence must entail the actual use of violence (and thus that all attempted crimes of violence must entail the attempted use of violence). The possibility of an attempt to threaten is completely overlooked, just like overlooking the possibility that yesterday’s happy hour order was itself in the earliest possible hour.

The fact that three consecutive panels of intelligent jurists confidently made such a basic error is a reminder to be wary of reflexive deference to precedent. Perhaps it seemed to these judges that attempted robbery must be a crime of violence, and this intuition led them to excuse less-than-rigorous logic. And perhaps these judges believed that ruling the other way would have been viewed as unorthodox, counterintuitive, and more likely to be reversed. When all these factors point toward the same “safe” answer, those forces can be difficult to overcome.

Both the Fourth Circuit and the lawyers for the defendant Taylor should thus be praised for sticking with their conviction that their logic was simply correct and would win out in the end. As the Fourth Circuit succinctly put it, the premise that an attempted crime of violence must itself be a crime of violence “simply is not so.” Had the Fourth Circuit not bucked the trend of decisions holding otherwise, it may have taken much longer for the question to reach the Supreme Court and for the error in those other circuits to be corrected.

Justice Scalia used to award an “E pur si muove” prize to district judges whose opinions were finally vindicated at the Supreme Court despite being erroneously reversed by an appellate court. A new award may be in order for appellate panels willing to reject unanimous sister-circuit precedents who later find themselves similarly vindicated.