Cite as: 519 U. S. 33 (1996)
Opinion of the Court
Federal Constitution. Under Michigan v. Long, 463 U. S. 1032 (1983), when "a state court decision fairly appears to rest primarily on federal law, or to be interwoven with the federal law, and when the adequacy and independence of any possible state law ground is not clear from the face of the opinion, we will accept as the most reasonable explanation that the state court decided the case the way it did because it believed that federal law required it to do so." * Id., at 1040-1041. Although the opinion below mentions Art. I, § 14, of the Ohio Constitution in passing (a section which reads identically to the Fourth Amendment), the opinion clearly relies on federal law nevertheless. Indeed, the only cases it discusses or even cites are federal cases, except for one state case which itself applies the Federal Constitution.
Our jurisdiction is not defeated by the fact that these citations appear in the body of the opinion, while, under Ohio law, "[the] Supreme Court speaks as a court only through the syllabi of its cases." See Ohio v. Gallagher, 425 U. S. 257, 259 (1976). When the syllabus, as here, speaks only in general terms of "the federal and Ohio Constitutions," it is permissible for us to turn to the body of the opinion to discern the grounds for decision. Zacchini v. Scripps-Howard Broadcasting Co., 433 U. S. 562, 566 (1977).
Respondent Robinette also contends that we may not reach the question presented in the petition because the Supreme Court of Ohio also held, as set out in the syllabus paragraph (1):
"When the motivation behind a police officer's continued detention of a person stopped for a traffic violation is not related to the purpose of the original, constitutional stop, and when that continued detention is not based on any articulable facts giving rise to a suspicion of some
*Respondent and his amici ask us to take this opportunity to depart from Michigan v. Long. We are no more persuaded by this argument now than we were two Terms ago, see Arizona v. Evans, 514 U. S. 1 (1995), and we again reaffirm the Long presumption.
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