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16 The majority says that “since [AEDPA], second or successive §2255 motions are barred unless they rely on” one of two (and only two) circumstances: “ ‘newly discovered evidence,’ §2255(h)(1), or ‘a new rule of constitutional law,’ §2255(h)(2).” Legal innocence claims are barred, the majority holds, pursuant to this “straightforward negative inference.”  But there is a good reason that the negative-inference canon “must be applied with great caution.” A. Scalia & B. Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts 107 (2012). And the reason is that “its application depends so much on context.” Ibid. In this case, for instance, there are several strong contextual clues that substantially undercut the majority’s purportedly “straightforward” inferential reasoning.

First of all, while the majority interprets §2255(h) as if Congress designed that provision to impose “finality” without regard to the claims at issue (other than the two listed situations), see, as it turns out, that is not the primary purpose of §2255(h). Instead, §2255(h)’s “second or successive petition” bar was inserted into AEDPA to ensure that all available claims a prisoner has are brought in a single postconviction petition. In circumstances where the prisoner seeks to assert a claim that was previously unavailable (i.e., a claim that could not have been raised before), Congress permitted successive petitions.

Explaining this fully requires me to make a preliminary big-picture point. Section 2255 (originally and as amended by AEDPA) is not a gauntlet of arbitrary hurdles that Congress has erected to stymie prisoners who seek to obtain judicial review of their detention. Indeed, as explained, when Congress first enacted §2255, it had no intention of shrinking the catalog of available postconviction claims. Ante, at