This is confused in a bunch of ways. First, if the metric is “percentage of appeals taken by SCOTUS that yield reversal,” which that 79% reflects, then it’s not true: two other circuits had higher reversal rates in the period that stat is drawn from. politifact.com/punditfact/sta…
More importantly, the 9th circuit is huge. It hears many more cases than any other circuit. And, as a very general rule, SCOTUS doesn’t take a case unless there’s a decent chance of reversal on face. They don’t review uncontroversially correct rulings.
Which is why the average reversal rate is around 70%. But since SCOTUS only takes a tiny handful of cases each year, that’s still an infinitesimal fraction of the cases decided by any given circuit court in any given year. As in, maybe a dozen out of thousands.
Does that mean the 99.9% of 9th circuit cases that SCOTUS didn’t review were all correctly decided? Of course not. It just means you can’t draw many broadly illuminating conclusions from the tiny fraction of cases in which SCOTUS grants cert.
