The most remarkable thing about the Supreme Court’s decision this week in Ohio v. Clark wasn’t the result—reinstating a child abuse conviction and finding that the Constitution allowed the introduction of the victim’s statements without any opportunity for cross-examination—but how unified the Court seemed in its rapidly dwindling enthusiasm for one of its most celebrated recent precedents. Eleven years ago, in Crawford v. Washington, the Justices dramatically reinterpreted the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment, announcing with great fanfare that henceforth the Clause generally would bar prosecutors from introducing any “testimonial” statements from witnesses the defendant didn’t have a chance to cross-examine. The reviewing courts in Ohio relied on Crawford in reversing the conviction of Darius Clark, who had been convicted of assaulting a three-year-old boy left in his care. Clark’s conviction was based in part on statements the boy had made to his teachers, but the boy was ruled incompetent to testify and Clark and his lawyers never had a chance to question him. The state appellate court and the state supreme court concluded that these procedures violated Clark’s confrontation rights under Crawford, but the U.S. Supreme Court reversed.

Before the Justices issued their decision, Clark was widely seen as a difficult case, pitting the Court’s commitment to Crawford against its reluctance to create too many obstacles for child abuse prosecutions. And in recent years the Justices have had difficulty working out the implications of Crawford, often dividing sharply about how far it should reach. So the first surprise about the Court’s decision in Clark was that it was unanimous. Even Justice Scalia, who wrote the Court’s opinion in Crawford and has always been its most fervent defender, agreed that the victim’s statements in Clark should not count as “testimonial.” The second surprise was that the Court was relatively unified in its reasoning as well as in the result: six Justices joined the majority opinion, written by Justice Alito. The holdouts, concurring separately, were Justice Scalia, joined only by Justice Ginsburg, and Justice Thomas, who has for many years championed his own, idiosyncratic, highly restrictive view of what the Confrontation Clause forbids.

The third surprise was how chilly Justice Alito’s majority opinion was to Crawford. It’s been clear for some time that Justice Alito isn’t Crawford’s biggest fan, and that he hasn’t been alone on the Court in having reservations. Still, it’s notable how far Clark went in narrowing the implications of Crawford. The Court said the victim’s statement in Clark wasn’t “testimonial,” and therefore fell outside the scope of the Confrontation Clause, because the victim—a three-year-old boy, remember—didn’t have a criminal prosecution in mind when speaking with his teachers. Even Justice Scalia and Justice Ginsburg agreed with this part of the Court’s reasoning, which of course will make Crawford inapplicable to the vast majority of statements by very young children.

In the past the Court had suggested that the purpose of the interviewers might matter too, and Justice Alito and Justice Scalia hinted at that in their opinions in Clark as well. But they agreed that this didn’t complicate matters, even though Ohio like many states requires teachers to report suspected child abuse, because the teachers probably weren’t thinking mainly about a criminal prosecution, either, when they asked the boy about his injuries. And Justice Alito’s emphasis, in any event, was very heavily on the purposes of the victim, not on those of his interviewers.

Moreover, Justice Alito’s majority opinion went further and suggested that, even aside from the purpose behind the statements, they shouldn’t count as “testimonial” because they would probably have been admitted in an eighteenth-century trial, and because “the relationship between a student and his teacher is very different from that between a citizen and the police”—although he didn’t explain which differences mattered, or why. And he described Crawford rather neutrally as taking a “different approach” than the case it had overruled, Ohio v. Roberts—instead of saying, as the Court usually does when describing watershed cases, that it corrected the mistakes of the earlier one. The slight wasn’t lost on Justice Scalia, who complained that the Court was heaping “fresh dirt” on the confrontation right “so recently rescued from the grave in Crawford.”

What was most striking, though, wasn’t the Court’s disrespect for Crawford; it was the Court’s utter lack of interest in doing anything to help Crawford make sense. The Crawford doctrine was formalistic from the outset—proudly so, actually. The Roberts test was explicitly functional, tied to the reliability of whatever out-of-court statements the prosecution tried to introduce. Justice Scalia’s majority opinion in Crawford criticized that approach as too manipulative, and concurring in Clark Justice Scalia again suggested that the Roberts approach was far too friendly to prosecutors. But the formalism of Crawford increasingly makes the doctrine seem arbitrary and pointless. It’s completely unclear, for example, why it should matter that three-year-old victim in Clark wasn’t thinking about a criminal prosecution when he spoke to his teachers, or that—as Justice Alito, Justice Scalia, and Justice Thomas all stressed—the conversation between the boy and his teachers was relatively informal. One might think that the most important consideration in applying the Confrontation Clause to a case like Clark is when, if ever, it is fair to convict a criminal defendant based on a statement from a very young child who cannot be cross-examined. But that is a question that none of the three opinions in Clark even discussed.