Cite as: 526 U. S. 838 (1999)
Opinion of the Court
This rule of comity reduces friction between the state and federal court systems by avoiding the "unseem[liness]" of a federal district court's overturning a state court conviction without the state courts having had an opportunity to correct the constitutional violation in the first instance. Ibid. See also Duckworth v. Serrano, 454 U. S. 1, 3-4 (1981) (per curiam); Rose v. Lundy, supra, at 515-516.
Because the exhaustion doctrine is designed to give the state courts a full and fair opportunity to resolve federal constitutional claims before those claims are presented to the federal courts, we conclude that state prisoners must give the state courts one full opportunity to resolve any constitutional issues by invoking one complete round of the State's established appellate review process. Here, Illinois' established, normal appellate review procedure is a twotiered system. Comity, in these circumstances, dictates that Boerckel use the State's established appellate review procedures before he presents his claims to a federal court. Unlike the extraordinary procedures that we found unnecessary in Brown v. Allen and Wilwording v. Swenson, a petition for discretionary review in Illinois' Supreme Court is a normal, simple, and established part of the State's appellate review process. In the words of the statute, state prisoners have "the right . . . to raise" their claims through a petition for discretionary review in the State's highest court. § 2254(c). Granted, as Boerckel contends, Brief for Respondent 16, he has no right to review in the Illinois Supreme Court, but he does have a "right . . . to raise" his claims before that court. That is all § 2254(c) requires.
Boerckel contests this conclusion with two related arguments. His first argument is grounded in a stylized portrait of the Illinois appellate review process. According to Boerckel, Illinois' appellate review procedures make the intermediate appellate courts the primary focus of the system; all routine claims of error are directed to those courts. The Illinois Supreme Court, by contrast, serves only to an-
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