Cite as: 521 U. S. 320 (1997)
Rehnquist, C. J., dissenting
judgment of the Court of Appeals and remand the case for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
It is so ordered.
Chief Justice Rehnquist, with whom Justice Scalia, Justice Kennedy, and Justice Thomas join, dissenting.
The Court in this case conducts a truncated inquiry into a question of congressional intent, and, I believe, reaches the wrong result. The Court begins, uncontroversially enough, by observing that application of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) to pending cases depends upon congressional intent, and that our inquiry into that intent should rely upon the "normal rules" of statutory construction. Ante, at 326. The Court then proceeds, however, to disregard all of our retroactivity case law—which it rather oddly disparages as manifestations of "Landgraf's default rule," ibid.—in favor of a permissible, but by no means controlling, negative inference that it draws from the statutory text. I would instead interpret the AEDPA in light of the whole of our longstanding retroactivity jurisprudence, and accordingly find that the amended 28 U. S. C. § 2254(d) (1994 ed., Supp. II) applies to pending cases.
The first question we must ask is whether Congress has expressly resolved whether the provision in question applies to pending cases. Landgraf v. USI Film Products, 511 U. S. 244, 280 (1994). Here, the answer is plainly no. The AEDPA does not clearly state, one way or the other, whether chapter 153 applies to pending cases. Given congressional silence, we must still interpret that statute, and that interpretation is in turn guided by the retroactivity principles we have developed over the years. The Court relies on one canon of statutory interpretation, expressio unius est exclusio alterius, to the exclusion of all others.
The Court's opinion rests almost entirely on the negative inference that can be drawn from the fact that Congress expressly made chapter 154, pertaining to capital cases, ap-
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