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529US2

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WILLIAMS v. TAYLOR

Opinion of Stevens, J.

had congruent concepts in mind.11
It is perfectly clear that
AEDPA codiﬁes Teague to the extent that Teague requires
federal habeas courts to deny relief that is contingent upon
a rule of law not clearly established at the time the state
conviction became ﬁnal.12

Teague’s core principles are therefore relevant to our con-
Justice Harlan recognized

struction of this requirement.

11 It is not unusual for Congress to codify earlier precedent in the habeas
context. Thus, for example, the exhaustion rule applied in Ex parte
Hawk, 321 U. S. 114 (1944) (per curiam), and the abuse of the writ doc-
trine applied in Sanders v. United States, 373 U. S. 1 (1963), were later
codiﬁed. See 28 U. S. C. § 2254(b) (1994 ed., Supp. III) (exhaustion re-
quirement); 28 U. S. C. § 2254, Rule 9(b), Rules Governing § 2254 Cases in
the United States District Courts. A previous version of § 2254, as we
stated in Miller v. Fenton, 474 U. S. 104, 111 (1985), “was an almost verba-
tim codiﬁcation of the standards delineated in Townsend v. Sain, 372 U. S.
293 (1963), for determining when a district court must hold an evidentiary
hearing before acting on a habeas petition.”

12 We are not persuaded by the argument that because Congress used
the words “clearly established law” and not “new rule,” it meant in this
section to codify an aspect of the doctrine of executive qualiﬁed immunity
rather than Teague’s antiretroactivity bar. Brief for Respondent 28–29,
n. 19. The warden refers us speciﬁcally to § 2244(b)(2)(A) and 28 U. S. C.
§ 2254(e)(2) (1994 ed., Supp. III), in which the statute does in so many
words employ the “new rule” language familiar to Teague and its progeny.
Congress thus knew precisely the words to use if it had wished to codify
Teague per se. That it did not use those words in § 2254(d) is evidence,
the argument goes, that it had something else in mind entirely in amend-
ing that section. We think, quite the contrary, that the verbatim adoption
of the Teague language in these other sections bolsters our impression that
Congress had Teague—and not any unrelated area of our jurisprudence—
speciﬁcally in mind in amending the habeas statute. These provisions,
seen together, make it impossible to conclude that Congress was not fully
aware of, and interested in codifying into law, that aspect of this Court’s
habeas doctrine. We will not assume that in a single subsection of an
amendment entirely devoted to the law of habeas corpus, Congress made
the anomalous choice of reaching into the doctrinally distinct law of quali-
ﬁed immunity for a single phrase that just so happens to be the conceptual
twin of a dominant principle in habeas law of which Congress was fully
aware.