Thomas delivers the opinion of the Court, joined in full by Blackmun, Stevens, Scalia, and Souter, and joined in Parts I and III by White and Kennedy.
Scalia files a concurring opinion.
Kennedy files an opinion concurring in part and concurring in the judgment, joined by White.
O'Connor files a dissenting opinion, joined by Rehnquist.
The Court holds that when it applies a rule of federal law to the parties before it, that rule is the controlling interpretation of federal law and must be given full retroactive effect in all cases still open on direct review and as to all events, regardless of whether such events predate or postdate the announcement of the rule.
Scalia is "provoke[d]" to "comment", not on Thomas' majority opinion, but on the dissent's "invoking stare decisis in defense of prospective decisionmaking" (applying a rule of federal law only to future cases, in contrast to retroactive decisionmaking). "[T]he dissent is saying, in effect, that stare decisis demands the preservation of methods of destroying stare decisis recently invented in violation of stare decisis." More so than Thomas, Scalia seeks to justify the Court's judgment on the basis of precedent -- going all the way back to Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803), and Blackstone. To Scalia, retroactivity is not just a legal doctrine; rather, it is "grounded" in the separation of powers, is "a principal distinction between the judicial and legislative power", and is "an inherent characteristic" of the former. Perhaps if some other justice had written the majority opinion, Thomas would have felt free to join Scalia's concurrence.
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