Cite as: 532 U. S. 451 (2001)
Opinion of the Court
tioner does not even so much as hint that good reasons exist for retaining the rule, and so we need not delve too deeply into the rule and its history here. Suffice it to say that the rule is generally believed to date back to the 13th century, when it served as a statute of limitations governing the time in which an individual might initiate a private action for murder known as an "appeal of death"; that by the 18th century the rule had been extended to the law governing public prosecutions for murder; that the primary and most frequently cited justification for the rule is that 13th century medical science was incapable of establishing causation beyond a reasonable doubt when a great deal of time had elapsed between the injury to the victim and his death; and that, as practically every court recently to have considered the rule has noted, advances in medical and related science have so undermined the usefulness of the rule as to render it without question obsolete. See, e. g., People v. Carrillo, 164 Ill. 2d 144, 150, 646 N. E. 2d 582, 585 (1995); Commonwealth v. Lewis, 381 Mass. 411, 414-415, 409 N. E. 2d 771, 772-773 (1980); People v. Stevenson, 416 Mich. 383, 391-392, 331 N. W. 2d 143, 146 (1982); State v. Hefler, 310 N. C. 135, 138-140, 310 S. E. 2d 310, 313 (1984); see generally Comment, 59 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1337 (1992) (tracing the history of the rule).
For this reason, the year and a day rule has been legislatively or judicially abolished in the vast majority of jurisdictions recently to have addressed the issue. See 992 S. W. 2d, at 397, n. 4 (reviewing cases and statutes). Citing Bouie, petitioner contends that the judicial abolition of the rule in other jurisdictions is irrelevant to whether he had fair warning that the rule in Tennessee might similarly be abolished and, hence, to whether the Tennessee court's decision was unexpected and indefensible as applied to him. Brief for Petitioner 28-30. In discussing the apparent meaning of the South Carolina statute in Bouie, we noted that "[i]t would be a rare situation in which the meaning of a statute of another State sufficed to afford a person 'fair warning' that his own
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