Procedural default is a concept in American federal law that requires a state prisoner seeking a writ of ''

habeas corpus ''Habeas corpus'' (; from Medieval Latin, ) is a recourse in law through which a person can report an unlawful detention or imprisonment to a court and request that the court order the custodian of the person, usually a prison official, t ...

'' in federal court to have "present dhis federal law argument to the state courts in compliance with state procedural rules. Failure to do so will bar any attempt to present that argument to the federal courts on collateral review. A petitioner may evade this bar only by showing 'cause' and 'prejudice' for the default – that is, by stating a good reason for not presenting the federal claim to the state courts, and by showing that the federal error worked to the petitioner's 'actual and substantial disadvantage.'"Ernest Young, ''Institutional Settlement in a Globalizing Judicial System'', 54 Duke L. J. 1143, 1166 (2005) (footnotes omitted).

References

United States federal law {{law-term-stub