Federal Habeas Corpus Practice and Procedure
Files
Description
Our publication of a new edition of Federal Habeas Corpus Practice and Procedure, so soon after the third edition in 1998, reflects the rapidity with which habeas corpus law has been changing in recent years. The enactment of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) added vast new complications to an already complex field of law, prompting disagreements among and within circuits as the lower federal courts struggled to interpret the statute’s ambiguous and often poorly drafted provisions. In the few years since the last edition, the Supreme Court has issued decisions resolving some of the most hotly disputed issues concerning AEDPA’s interpretation. These decisions, on the whole, provide further evidence of a trend that had begun to become apparent at the time of the last edition: that the Supreme Court is inclined to construe AEDPA narrowly so as to preserve what the Court recently called the “vital role” that “[t]he writ of habeas corpus plays … in protecting constitutional rights.” In 2000, for example, the Court rejected a restrictive interpretation—urged by the government and adopted by some of the circuits—of AEDPA’s rule governing federal court review of state court determinations of legal and mixed legal-factual questions; instead, the Court construed the provision in a manner that recognizes the continuing obligation of federal habeas courts to scrutinize state court rulings on federal constitutional claims independently. In three decisions in 2001, the Court reaffirmed the writ’s longstanding role in the immigration context, rejecting government arguments that AEDPA and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (HRIRA) should be construed as foreclosing habeas corpus review of orders of deportation and exclusion (not called orders of “removal”). Many of the lower federal courts have taken their cues from the Supreme Court’s decisions of recent years and have been construing and applying AEDPA in a manner that recognizes and contributes to the continuing robustness of the writ. It is now apparent, therefore, that AEDPA did not, as some commentators had predicted at the time of its enactment, sound the death knell for the writ of habeas corpus. What AEDPA unmistakably did, however, was to complicate and confuse the law of habeas corpus. One of the consequences of AEDPA’s enactment is that there are now three different sets of rules that may potentially govern in a federal postconviction proceeding. Which set applies depends upon one or more of four factors—the date on which a case was filed, the date on which other events in the case took place, whether or not the petitioner is under sentence of death and, if so, the quality of capital postconviction review procedures available in the State that sentenced the petitioner. As a result, this edition, like the last one, discusses numerous doctrinal variations that apply to some cases but not others. We do so by presenting an overview of AEDPA’s provisions in Chapter 3 (which includes, in §3.5b, an outline of the rules that apply to different types of cases) and then by delineating in each subsequent chapter the specific changes that AEDPA makes and the types of cases to which the changes apply. Notwithstanding the recent Supreme Court decisions, much of the law governing federal habeas corpus and section 2255 proceedings is still in flux. This edition canvasses the current state of the law and offers our thoughts about the most satisfactory way to resolve the interpretive controversies that remain. We caution our readers, however, to supplement our analyses and predictions with careful study of recent legal developments in the district and circuit courts as well as the Supreme Court, a significant number of which will assuredly occur after this edition’s publication. As in the past, we will use annual updates to help keep readers abreast of new developments and to elaborate upon—and, where appropriate, revise—the analyses we present in this edition.
Publication Date
2001
Edition
4
Recommended Citation
Hertz, Randy A. and Liebman, James S., "Federal Habeas Corpus Practice and Procedure" (2001). Faculty Books & Edited Works. 395.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-books-edited-works/395
