Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/529bv.pdf
Page Number: 969

529US3

Unit: $U62

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894

GEIER v. AMERICAN HONDA MOTOR CO.

Stevens, J., dissenting

without any pre-emption defense—did not provide them
with a sufﬁcient incentive to engage in widespread installa-
tion of airbags.

Turning to the subject of pre-emption, Honda contends
that the Safety Act’s pre-emption provision, 15 U. S. C.
§ 1392(d), expressly pre-empts petitioners’ common-law no-
airbag claims.
It also argues that the claims are in any
event impliedly pre-empted because the imposition of liabil-
ity in cases such as this would frustrate the purposes
of Standard 208.
I discuss these alternative arguments in
turn.

III

When a state statute, administrative rule, or common-law
cause of action conﬂicts with a federal statute, it is axiomatic
that the state law is without effect. U. S. Const., Art. VI,
cl. 2; Cipollone v. Liggett Group, Inc., 505 U. S. 504, 516
(1992). On the other hand, it is equally clear that the Su-
premacy Clause does not give unelected federal judges carte
blanche to use federal law as a means of imposing their own
ideas of tort reform on the States.9 Because of the role of
States as separate sovereigns in our federal system, we have
long presumed that state laws—particularly those, such as
the provision of tort remedies to compensate for personal
injuries, that are within the scope of the States’ historic po-
lice powers—are not to be pre-empted by a federal statute
unless it is the clear and manifest purpose of Congress to do
so. Medtronic, Inc. v. Lohr, 518 U. S. 470, 485 (1996); Gade
v. National Solid Wastes Management Assn., 505 U. S. 88,
116–117 (1992) (Souter, J., dissenting) (“If the [federal] stat-
ute’s terms can be read sensibly not to have a pre-emptive
effect, the presumption controls and no pre-emption may be
inferred”).

9 Regrettably, the Court has not always honored the latter proposition
as scrupulously as the former. See, e. g., Boyle v. United Technologies
Corp., 487 U. S. 500 (1988).