Cite as: 509 U. S. 86 (1993)
O'Connor, J., dissenting
how one reads the solitary sentence upon which the Court relies, surely it does not "squarely address" the question of retroactivity; it does not even mention retroactivity. At best, by addressing the question of remedies, the sentence implicitly "assumes" the rule in Davis to be retroactive. Our decision in Brecht, however, makes it quite clear that unexamined assumptions do not bind this Court. Brecht, supra, at 631 (That the Court "assumed the applicability of" a rule does not bind the Court to the assumption).
In fact, there is far less reason to consider ourselves bound by precedent today than there was in Brecht. In Brecht, the issue was not whether a legal question was resolved by a single case; it was whether our consistent practice of applying a particular rule, Chapman v. California, 386 U. S. 18, 24 (1967), to cases on collateral review precluded us from limiting the rule's application to cases on direct review. Because none of our prior cases directly had addressed the applicability of Chapman to cases on collateral review—each had only assumed it applied—the Court held that those cases did not bind us to any particular result. See Brecht, supra, at 630-631. I see no reason why a single retroactive application of the Davis rule, inferred from the sparse and ambiguous language of Davis itself, should carry more weight here than our consistent practice did in Brecht.
The Court offers no justification for disregarding the settled rule we so recently applied in Brecht. Nor do I believe it could, for the rule is not a procedural nicety. On the contrary, it is critical to the soundness of our decisional processes. It should go without saying that any decision of this Court has wide-ranging applications; nearly every opinion we issue has effects far beyond the particular case in which it issues. The rule we applied in Brecht, which limits the stare decisis effect of our decisions to questions actually considered and passed on, ensures that this Court does not decide important questions by accident or inadvertence. By adopting a contrary rule in the area of retroactivity, the
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