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Opinion of the Court
Evans, 514 U. S. 1, 24 (1995) (Ginsburg, J., dissenting). Accordingly, we hold that the Anders procedure is merely one method of satisfying the requirements of the Constitution for indigent criminal appeals. States may—and, we are confi-dent, will—craft procedures that, in terms of policy, are superior to, or at least as good as, that in Anders. The Constitution erects no barrier to their doing so.7
III
Having determined that California's Wende procedure is not unconstitutional merely because it diverges from the Anders procedure, we turn to consider the Wende procedure on its own merits. We think it clear that California's system does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, for it provides "a criminal appellant pursuing a first appeal as of right [the] minimum safeguards necessary to make that appeal 'adequate and effective,' " Evitts v. Lucey, 469 U. S. 387, 392 (1985) (quoting Griffin, 351 U. S., at 20 (plurality opinion)).
A
As we have admitted on numerous occasions, " '[t]he precise rationale for the Griffin and Douglas lines of cases has never been explicitly stated, some support being derived from the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and some from the Due Process Clause of that Amendment.' " Evitts, supra, at 403 (quoting Ross v. Moffitt, 417 U. S. 600, 608-609 (1974) (footnote omitted)). But our case law reveals that, as a practical matter, the two Clauses largely converge to require that a State's procedure "affor[d] adequate and effective appellate review to indigent defendants," Griffin, 351 U. S., at 20 (plurality opinion). A State's procedure provides such review so long as it reasonably en-7 States have, in fact, already been doing this to some degree. See Warner, Anders in the Fifty States: Some Appellants' Equal Protection is More Equal Than Others', 23 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. 625, 642-662 (1996); Arizona v. Clark, 196 Ariz. 530, 536-539, 2 P. 3d 89, 95-98 (App. 1999).
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