Cite as: 518 U. S. 938 (1996)
Stevens, J., dissenting
and [a] desire to avoid advisory opinions, . . . we [did] not wish to continue to decide issues of state law that go beyond the opinion that we review, or to require state courts to reconsider cases to clarify the grounds of their decisions." 463 U. S., at 1040. When "a state court decision fairly appears to rest primarily on federal law, or to be interwoven with the federal law, and when the adequacy and independence of any possible state law ground is not clear from the face of the opinion," we held, we would conclude that the State decided as it did because federal law required it to do so. Id., at 1040-1041.
Given the explicit and nearly exclusive references to state law that I review above, it seems to me that the Court's decision to take jurisdiction in Labron not only extends Michigan v. Long beyond its original scope, but stands its rationale on its head. Labron does not rest "primarily" on federal law; as Justice Castille understood it, as the briefing in White understood it, and as the Commonwealth's decision to stay out of White demonstrates, every indication is that the rule adopted in Labron and White rests primarily on state law. Nor are these holdings "interwoven" with federal law: Both Labron and White cite only two federal cases, both over a quarter-century old; rather than implicitly conclude that the absence of any reference to more recent decisions is due to poor legal research, I would trust the Pennsylvania courts' ability to understand and choose to deviate from our federal law. Certainly it would be a more respectful approach, in a case where the question is as close as it is in this case, to conclude that the State had made a conscious decision to depart from the jurisprudence of this Court rather than an error of law.6
6 Indeed, the author of Labron noted in White that "the history of Article I, Section 8 and case-law interpreting it reveal a history of according a limited expectation of privacy in an automobile independently under the Pennsylvania Constitution. Therefore, the question before us today is not whether we wish to extend additional privacy protections to the Appellant
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