304
O'Connor, J., concurring in judgment
tablish a standard of review at all. Instead, Teague simply requires that a state conviction on federal habeas be judged according to the law in existence when the conviction became final. Penry, supra, at 314; Teague, supra, at 301. In Teague, we refused to give state prisoners the retroactive benefit of new rules of law, but we did not create any defer-ential standard of review with regard to old rules.
To determine what counts as a new rule, Teague requires courts to ask whether the rule a habeas petitioner seeks can be meaningfully distinguished from that established by binding precedent at the time his state court conviction became final. Cf. Mackey v. United States, 401 U. S. 667, 695 (1971) (inquiry is "to determine whether a particular decision has really announced a 'new' rule at all or whether it has simply applied a well-established constitutional principle to govern a case which is closely analogous to those which have been previously considered in the prior case law") (Harlan, J., concurring in judgments in part and dissenting in part) (internal quotation marks omitted; emphasis added). Even though we have characterized the new rule inquiry as whether "reasonable jurists" could disagree as to whether a result is dictated by precedent, see Sawyer v. Smith, 497 U. S. 227, 234 (1990), the standard for determining when a case establishes a new rule is "objective," and the mere existence of conflicting authority does not necessarily mean a rule is new. Stringer v. Black, 503 U. S. 222, 237 (1992). If a proffered factual distinction between the case under consideration and pre-existing precedent does not change the force with which the precedent's underlying principle applies, the distinction is not meaningful, and any deviation from precedent is not reasonable.
So, while Justice Thomas says that we "defer" to state courts' determinations of federal law, the statement is misleading. Although in practice, it may seem only "a matter of phrasing" whether one calls the Teague inquiry a standard of review or not, "phrasing mirrors thought, [and] it is impor-
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