380
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 construction of this requirement. Justice Harlan recognized
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 doctrine 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 requirement); 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 verbatim 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 amending 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 qualified 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.
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