Opinion ID: 1908530
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Beam and Harper.

Text: Mendes v. Johnson was decided twenty years ago. In the intervening years, the Supreme Court has discarded its previous approach to retroactivitythe very approach on which this court based its decision in Mendes. In 1987, Linkletter v. Walker , the principal authority upon which Mendes was based, was explicitly overruled. See Griffith v. Kentucky, 479 U.S. 314, 322-23, 107 S.Ct. 708, 93 L.Ed.2d 649 (1987) (holding that all newly declared rules must be applied retroactively to all criminal cases pending on direct review). The Court explained in Griffith that the task of making rules of law on a broad basis is a legislative one, and that the nature of judicial adjudication requires that the Court adopt new rules in the context of specific cases. Id. at 322, 107 S.Ct. 708. The Court also concluded that selective application of new rules violates the principle of treating similarly situated [parties] the same. Id. at 323, 107 S.Ct. 708. Since Griffith, the rule of retroactive application has been explicitly extended to civil cases. In James B. Beam Distilling Co. v. Georgia, 501 U.S. 529, 111 S.Ct. 2439, 115 L.Ed.2d 481 (1991), a majority of Justices agreed that a rule of federal law, once announced and applied to the parties to the controversy, must be given full retroactive effect by all courts adjudicating federal law. See id. at 540, 111 S.Ct. 2439 (opinion of Souter, J.); id. at 544, 111 S.Ct. 2439 (opinion of White, J.); id. at 548, 111 S.Ct. 2439 (opinion of Marshall, J.); id. at 548-49, 111 S.Ct. 2439 (opinion of Scalia, J.). In Harper v. Virginia Dep't of Taxation, 509 U.S. 86, 97, 113 S.Ct. 2510, 125 L.Ed.2d 74 (1993), the Court expanded on Beam as follows: When this Court applies a rule of federal law to the parties before it, that rule is the controlling interpretation of federal law and must be given full retroactive effect in all cases still open on direct review and as to all events, regardless of whether such events predate or postdate our announcement of the rule. This rule extends Griffith 's ban against selective application of new rules. 479 U.S., at 323 [107 S.Ct. 708]. Mindful of the basic norms of constitutional adjudication that animated our view of retroactivity in the criminal context, id., at 322 [107 S.Ct. 708], we now prohibit the erection of selective temporal barriers to the application of federal law in non-criminal cases. In both civil and criminal cases, we can scarcely permit the substantive law [to] shift and spring according to the particular equities of [individual parties'] claims of actual reliance on an old rule and of harm from a retroactive application of the new rule. Beam, supra, at 543 [111 S.Ct. 2439] (opinion of Souter, J.). Our approach to retroactivity heeds the admonition that [t]he Court has no more constitutional authority in civil cases than in criminal cases to disregard current law or to treat similarly situated litigants differently. [5] The Court also stated that the federal law applicable to a particular case does not turn on whether [the] litigants actually relied on an old rule or how they would suffer from retroactive application of a new one. Id. at 95 n. 9, 113 S.Ct. 2510 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted).