542
Scalia, J., dissenting
requirement that federal habeas courts respect state-court factual determinations.
1
We have defined "clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States," to encompass "the holdings . . . of this Court's decisions as of the time of the relevant state-court decision." Williams v. Taylor, 529 U. S. 362, 412 (2000) (emphasis added). Yet in discussing what our precedents have "clearly established" with respect to ineffectiveness claims, the Court relies upon a case—Williams v. Taylor, supra—that postdates the Maryland court's decision rejecting Wiggins' Sixth Amendment claim. See ante, at 522. The Court concedes that Williams was not "clearly established Federal law" at the time of the Maryland Court of Appeals' decision, ante, at 522, yet believes that it may ignore § 2254(d)'s strictures on the ground that "Williams' case was before us on habeas review[, and] we therefore made no new law in resolving [his] ineffectiveness claim," ibid. The Court is wrong—in both its premise and its conclusion.
Although Williams was a habeas case, we reviewed the first prong of the habeas petitioner's Strickland claim— the inadequate-performance question—de novo. Williams had surmounted § 2254(d)'s bar to habeas relief because we held that the Virginia Supreme Court's analysis with respect to Strickland's second prong—the prejudice prong—was both "contrary to," and "an unreasonable application of," our clearly established precedents. See Williams, supra, at 393-394, 397. That left us free to provide habeas relief— and since the State had not raised a Teague defense, see Teague v. Lane, 489 U. S. 288 (1989), we proceeded to analyze the inadequate-performance contention de novo, rather than under "clearly established" law. That is clear from the fact that we cited no cases in our discussion of the inadequate-performance question, see 529 U. S., at 395-396. The Court is mistaken to assert that this discussion "made no new law,"
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