Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/529bv.pdf
Page Number: 986

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Cite as: 529 U. S. 861 (2000)

911

Stevens, J., dissenting

regulatory history and ﬁnal commentary. The latter two
sources are even more malleable than legislative history.
Thus, when snippets from them are combined with the
Court’s broad conception of a doctrine of frustration-of-
purposes pre-emption untempered by the presumption, a
vast, undeﬁned area of state law becomes vulnerable to pre-
emption by any related federal law or regulation.
In my
view, however, “preemption analysis is, or at least should
be, a matter of precise statutory [or regulatory] construction
rather than an exercise in free-form judicial policymaking.”
1 L. Tribe, American Constitutional Law § 6–28, p. 1177 (3d
ed. 2000).

As to the Secretary’s litigating position, it is clear that “an
interpretation contained in a [legal brief], not one arrived
at after, for example, a formal adjudication or notice-and-
comment rulemaking[,] . . . do[es] not warrant Chevron-style
deference.” Christensen v. Harris County, ante, at 587.
Moreover, our pre-emption precedents and the APA estab-
lish that even if the Secretary’s litigating position were co-
herent, the lesser deference paid to it by the Court today
would be inappropriate. Given the Secretary’s contention
that he has the authority to promulgate safety standards
that pre-empt state law and the fact that he could promul-
gate a standard such as the one quoted supra, at 887, with
relative ease, we should be quite reluctant to ﬁnd pre-
emption based only on the Secretary’s informal effort to re-
cast the 1984 version of Standard 208 into a pre-emptive
mold.25 See Hillsborough County v. Automated Medical

25 The cases cited by the Court, ante, at 883, are not to the contrary.
In
City of New York v. FCC, 486 U. S. 57 (1988), for example, we were faced
with Federal Communications Commission regulations that explicitly “re-
afﬁrmed the Commission’s established policy of pre-empting local regula-
Id., at 62,
tion of technical signal quality standards for cable television.”
65.
It was only in determining whether the issuance of such regulations
was a proper exercise of the authority delegated to the agency by Con-
gress that we afforded a measure of deference to the agency’s interpreta-
tion of that authority, as formally expressed through its explicitly pre-