Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/529bv.pdf
Page Number: 460.0

529US2

Unit: $U46

[10-07-01 17:18:24] PAGES PGT: OPIN

Cite as: 529 U. S. 362 (2000)

385

Opinion of Stevens, J.

incrementally as earlier decisions are applied to new factual
situations. See Wright, 505 U. S., at 307 (Kennedy, J., con-
curring in judgment). But rules that depend upon such
elaboration are hardly less lawlike than those that establish
a bright-line test.

Indeed, our pre-AEDPA efforts to distinguish questions of
fact, questions of law, and “mixed questions,” and to create
an appropriate standard of habeas review for each, generated
some not insubstantial differences of opinion as to which is-
sues of law fell into which category of question, and as to
which standard of review applied to each. See Thompson,
516 U. S., at 110–111 (acknowledging “ ‘that the Court has
not charted an entirely clear course in this area’ ” and that
“the proper characterization of a question as one of fact or
law is sometimes slippery”) (quoting Miller, 474 U. S., at
113). We thus think the Fourth Circuit was correct when it
attributed the lack of clarity in the statute, in part, to the
overlapping meanings of the phrases “contrary to” and “un-
reasonable application of.” See Green, 143 F. 3d, at 870.

The statutory text likewise does not obviously prescribe a
speciﬁc, recognizable standard of review for dealing with
either phrase. Signiﬁcantly, it does not use any term, such
as “de novo” or “plain error,” that would easily identify a
familiar standard of review. Rather, the text is fairly read
simply as a command that a federal court not issue the ha-
beas writ unless the state court was wrong as a matter of
law or unreasonable in its application of law in a given case.
The suggestion that a wrong state-court “decision”—a legal
judgment rendered “after consideration of facts, and .
.
law,” Black’s Law Dictionary 407 (6th ed. 1990) (emphasis
added)—may no longer be redressed through habeas (be-
cause it is unreachable under the “unreasonable application”
phrase) is based on a mistaken insistence that the § 2254(d)(1)
phrases have not only independent, but mutually exclusive,
meanings. Whether or not a federal court can issue the writ
“under [the] ‘unreasonable application’ clause,” the statute is

.