Cite as: 509 U. S. 86 (1993)
Syllabus
(a) This rule fairly reflects the position of a majority of Justices in Beam and extends to civil cases the ban against "selective application of new rules" in criminal cases. Griffith v. Kentucky, 479 U. S. 314, 323. Mindful of the "basic norms of constitutional adjudication" animating the Court's view of retroactivity in criminal cases, id., at 322—that the nature of judicial review strips the Court of the quintessentially legislative prerogative to make rules of law retroactive or prospective as it sees fit and that selective application of new rules violates the principle of treating similarly situated parties the same, id., at 322, 323—the Court prohibits the erection of selective temporal barriers to the application of federal law in noncriminal cases. When the Court does not reserve the question whether its holding should be applied to the parties before it, the opinion is properly understood to have followed the normal rule of retroactive application, Beam, 501 U. S., at 540 (opinion of Souter, J.), and the legal imperative to apply such a rule prevails "over any claim based on a Chevron Oil analysis," ibid. Pp. 94-98. (b) This Court applied the rule of law announced in Davis to the parties before the Court. The Court's response to Michigan's concession that a refund would be appropriate in Davis, far from reserving the retroactivity question, constituted a retroactive application of the rule. A decision to accord solely prospective effect to Davis would have foreclosed any discussion of remedial issues. Pp. 98-99. 2. The decision below does not rest on independent and adequate state-law grounds. In holding that state-law retroactivity doctrine permitted the solely prospective application of the ruling, the State Supreme Court simply incorporated into state law the analysis of Chevron Oil and criminal retroactivity cases overruled by Griffith. The Supremacy Clause, however, does not allow federal retroactivity doctrine to be supplanted by the invocation of a contrary approach to retroactivity under state law. Similarly, the state court's conclusion that the challenged assessments were not erroneous or improper under state law rested solely on its determination that Davis did not apply retroactively. Pp. 99-100. 3. Virginia is free to choose the form of relief it will provide, so long as that relief is consistent with federal due process principles. A State retains flexibility in responding to the determination that it has imposed an impermissibly discriminatory tax. The availability of a predeprivation hearing constitutes a procedural safeguard sufficient to satisfy due process, but if no such relief exists, the State must provide meaningful backward-looking relief either by awarding full refunds or by issuing some other order that creates in hindsight a nondiscriminatory scheme. Since any remedy's constitutional sufficiency turns (at least initially) on whether Virginia law provides an adequate form of predeprivation proc-
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