Opinion ID: 112777
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Post-1969 Fraud and Misrepresentation Claims

Text: According to the plurality, at least one of petitioner's intentional fraud and misrepresentation claims survives § 5(b) of the 1969 Act because the common-law duty underlying that claim is not based on smoking and health within the meaning of the Act. See ante, at 528-529. If I understand the plurality's reasoning, it proceeds from the implicit assumption that only duties deriving from laws that are specifically directed to smoking and health, or that are uniquely crafted to address the relationship between cigarette companies and their putative victims, fall within § 5(b) of the Act, as amended. Given that New Jersey's tort-law duty not to deceive, ante, at 529, is a general one, applicable to all commercial actors and all kinds of commerce, it follows from this assumption that § 5(b) does not pre-empt claims based on breaches of that duty. This analysis is suspect, to begin with, because the plurality is unwilling to apply it consistently. As Justice Blackmun cogently explains, see ante, at 543 (opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part), if New Jersey's common-law duty to avoid false statements of material factas applied to the cigarette companies' behavioris not based on smoking and health, the same must be said of New Jersey's common-law duty to warn about a product's dangers. Each duty transcends the relationship between the cigarette companies and cigarette smokers; neither duty was specifically crafted with an eye toward smoking and health. None of the arguments the plurality advances to support its distinction between the two is persuasive. That Congress specifically preserved, in both the 1965 and 1969 Acts, the Federal Trade Commission's authority to police deceptive advertising practices, see § 5(c) of the 1965 Act; § 7(b) of the 1969 Act; ante, at 529, does not suggest that Congress intended comparable state authority to survive § 5(b). In fact, at least in the 1965 Act (which generally excluded federal as well as state regulation), the exemption suggested that § 5(b) was broad enough to reach laws governing fraud and misrepresentation. And it is not true that the States' laws governing fraud and misrepresentation in advertising impose identical legal standards, whereas their laws concerning the warning necessary to render a product `reasonably safe'  are quite diverse, ibid. The question whether an ad featuring a glamorous, youthful smoker with pearly-white teeth is misrepresentative would almost certainly be answered differently from State to State. See ante, at 527 (discussing FTC's initial cigarette advertising rules). Once one is forced to select a consistent methodology for evaluating whether a given legal duty is based on smoking and health, it becomes obvious that the methodology must focus not upon the ultimate source of the duty ( e. g., the common law) but upon its proximate application. Use of the ultimate source approach ( i. e., a legal duty is not based on smoking and health unless the law from which it derives is directed only to smoking and health) would gut the statute, inviting the very diverse, nonuniform, and confusing cigarette . . . advertising regulations Congress sought to avoid. 15 U. S. C. § 1331(2). And the problem is not simply the common law: Requirements could be imposed by state executive agencies as well, so long as they were operating under a general statute authorizing their supervision of commercial advertising or unfair trade practices. New Jersey and many other States have such statutes already on the books. E. g., N. J. Stat. Ann. § 56:8-1 et seq. (West 1989); N. Y. Gen. Bus. Law § 349 et seq. (McKinney 1988 and Supp. 1992); Texas Bus. & Com. Code Ann. § 17.01 et seq. (1987 and Supp. 1992). I would apply to all petitioner's claims what I have called a proximate application methodology for determining whether they invoke duties based on smoking and health I would ask, that is, whether, whatever the source of the duty, it imposes an obligation in this case because of the effect of smoking upon health. On that basis, I would find petitioner's failure-to-warn and misrepresentation claims both pre-empted.