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Opinion of the Court
court renders its decision. See id., at 405, 413; Bell v. Cone, 535 U. S. 685, 698 (2002). In most situations, the task of determining what we have clearly established will be straightforward. The difficulty with Andrade's position, however, is that our precedents in this area have not been a model of clarity. See Harmelin v. Michigan, 501 U. S., at 965 (opinion of Scalia, J.); id., at 996, 998 (Kennedy, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment). Indeed, in determining whether a particular sentence for a term of years can violate the Eighth Amendment, we have not established a clear or consistent path for courts to follow. See Ewing v. California, ante, at 20-23.
B
Through this thicket of Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, one governing legal principle emerges as "clearly established" under § 2254(d)(1): A gross disproportionality principle is applicable to sentences for terms of years.
Our cases exhibit a lack of clarity regarding what factors may indicate gross disproportionality. In Solem (the case upon which Andrade relies most heavily), we stated: "It is clear that a 25-year sentence generally is more severe than a 15-year sentence, but in most cases it would be difficult to decide that the former violates the Eighth Amendment while the latter does not." 463 U. S., at 294 (footnote omitted). And in Harmelin, both Justice Kennedy and Justice Scalia repeatedly emphasized this lack of clarity: that "Solem was scarcely the expression of clear . . . constitutional law," 501 U. S., at 965 (opinion of Scalia, J.), that in "adher[ing] to the narrow proportionality principle . . . our proportionality decisions have not been clear or consistent in all respects," id., at 996 (Kennedy, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment), that "we lack clear objective standards to distinguish between sentences for different terms of years," id., at 1001 (Kennedy, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment), and that the "precise contours" of the
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