Cite as: 529 U. S. 362 (2000)
Opinion of Stevens, J.
incrementally as earlier decisions are applied to new factual situations. See Wright, 505 U. S., at 307 (Kennedy, J., concurring in judgment). But rules that depend upon such elaboration are hardly less lawlike than those that establish a bright-line test.
Indeed, our pre-AEDPA efforts to distinguish questions of fact, questions of law, and "mixed questions," and to create an appropriate standard of habeas review for each, generated some not insubstantial differences of opinion as to which issues of law fell into which category of question, and as to which standard of review applied to each. See Thompson, 516 U. S., at 110-111 (acknowledging " 'that the Court has not charted an entirely clear course in this area' " and that "the proper characterization of a question as one of fact or law is sometimes slippery") (quoting Miller, 474 U. S., at 113). We thus think the Fourth Circuit was correct when it attributed the lack of clarity in the statute, in part, to the overlapping meanings of the phrases "contrary to" and "un-reasonable application of." See Green, 143 F. 3d, at 870.
The statutory text likewise does not obviously prescribe a specific, recognizable standard of review for dealing with either phrase. Significantly, it does not use any term, such as "de novo" or "plain error," that would easily identify a familiar standard of review. Rather, the text is fairly read simply as a command that a federal court not issue the habeas writ unless the state court was wrong as a matter of law or unreasonable in its application of law in a given case. The suggestion that a wrong state-court "decision"—a legal judgment rendered "after consideration of facts, and . . . law," Black's Law Dictionary 407 (6th ed. 1990) (emphasis added)—may no longer be redressed through habeas (be-cause it is unreachable under the "unreasonable application" phrase) is based on a mistaken insistence that the § 2254(d)(1) phrases have not only independent, but mutually exclusive, meanings. Whether or not a federal court can issue the writ "under [the] 'unreasonable application' clause," the statute is
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