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

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Opinion of O’Connor, J.

See 505 U. S., at 287–290. According to Justice Thomas,
the reliance of our precedents on Brown v. Allen, 344 U. S.
443 (1953), was erroneous because the Court in Brown never
explored in detail whether a federal habeas court, to deny a
state prisoner’s application, must conclude that the relevant
state-court adjudication was “correct” or merely that it was
“reasonable.” Wright, supra, at 287. Justice Thomas
suggested that the time to revisit our decisions may have
been at hand, given that our more recent habeas jurispru-
dence in the nonretroactivity context, see, e. g., Teague v.
Lane, 489 U. S. 288 (1989), had called into question the then-
settled rule of independent review of mixed constitutional
questions. Wright, 505 U. S., at 291–292, 294.

Id., at 300.

I wrote separately in Wright because I believed Justice
Thomas had “understate[d] the certainty with which Brown
v. Allen rejected a deferential standard of review of issues
I also explained that we had consid-
of law.”
ered the standard of review applicable to mixed constitu-
tional questions on numerous occasions and each time we
concluded that federal habeas courts had a duty to evaluate
Id., at 301–303. With re-
such questions independently.
spect to Justice Thomas’ suggestion that Teague and its
progeny called into question the vitality of the independent-
review rule, I noted that “Teague did not establish a ‘defer-
ential’ standard of review” because “[i]t did not establish a
standard of review at all.” 505 U. S., at 303–304. While
Teague did hold that state prisoners could not receive “the
retroactive beneﬁt of new rules of law,” it “did not create
any deferential standard of review with regard to old rules.”
505 U. S., at 304 (emphasis in original).

Finally, and perhaps most importantly for purposes of to-
day’s case, I stated my disagreement with Justice Thomas’
suggestion that de novo review is incompatible with the
maxim that federal habeas courts should “give great weight
to the considered conclusions of a coequal state judiciary,”
Miller, supra, at 112. Our statement in Miller signiﬁed