Opinion ID: 556603
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: preemption remains preeminent

Text: 7 Appellant insists that the court below was incorrect in ruling that the Labeling Act preempted her post-1965 claims of intentional misrepresentation. In response, appellees question our jurisdiction to entertain the argument; and tell us, in any event, that no error was committed.A. Appellate Jurisdiction. 8 Fed.R.App.P. 3(c) requires, inter alia, that a notice of appeal shall designate the judgment, order or part thereof appealed from. The Supreme Court has construed Rule 3(c) as being mandatory and jurisdictional. See Torres v. Oakland Scavenger Co., 487 U.S. 312, 315-16, 108 S.Ct. 2405, 2408, 101 L.Ed.2d 285 (1988). Nevertheless, in holding that the failure to name a party specifically in a notice of appeal constitutes a failure of that party to appeal, the Court took pains not to overrule Foman v. Davis, 371 U.S. 178, 181, 83 S.Ct. 227, 229, 9 L.Ed.2d 222 (1962). Although Foman held that the requirements of the rules of procedure should be liberally construed and that 'mere technicalities' should not stand in the way of consideration of a case on its merits, the Foman Court was addressing the separate provision of Rule 3(c) requiring that the judgments or orders appealed from be designated. Torres, 487 U.S. at 316, 108 S.Ct. at 2408. Thus, while all provisions of Rule 3(c) are mandatory and jurisdictional, the level of specificity required to satisfy the different provisions varies. Id. 9 This case implicates the looser Foman specificity standard rather than the unyielding core standard of Torres itself. We are faced with the threshold issue of whether the two notices of appeal which Kotler filed sufficiently designated the lower court's preemption ruling as a subject for appellate inquiry. 2 The order in question was part and parcel of Kotler I, originally decided in March 1988 and entered on the docket in final form that May. Neither notice of appeal alluded specifically to the order. 10 We start with basics. The general rule is that [a] mistake in designating a judgment or part of a judgment in the notice of appeal ordinarily will not result in loss of the appeal as long as the intent to appeal from a specific judgment can be fairly inferred from the notice, and appellee is not misled by the mistake. Kelly v. United States, 789 F.2d 94, 96 n. 3 (1st Cir.1986). In determining whether appellant's notices of appeal, despite their obvious failure to mention the May 1988 order, sufficiently demonstrated an intent to appeal that order, we are not limited to the four corners of the notices, but may examine them in the context of the record as a whole. See McLemore v. Landry, 898 F.2d 996, 999 (5th Cir.), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 111 S.Ct. 428, 112 L.Ed.2d 412 (1990); FTC v. Hughes, 891 F.2d 589, 590 (5th Cir.1990); Kruso v. International Tel. & Tel. Corp., 872 F.2d 1416, 1423 (9th Cir.1989), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 110 S.Ct. 3217, 110 L.Ed.2d 664 (1990); Brandt v. Schal Associates, Inc., 854 F.2d 948, 954-55 (7th Cir.1988). 11 In this case, the sufficiency of the notices of appeal is not easily proved or disproved. On the one hand, appellant's complete omission of any reference to the May 1988 order suggests abandonment of her quest; on the other hand, the papers contain intimations that appellant intended to fight the preemption ruling--indeed, in an earlier, untimely notice of appeal, now withdrawn, she mentioned it explicitly--and that appellees realized as much. While we tend to think that appellant fell short of meeting her burden in this respect, we hesitate to decide so bitterly contested a controversy by drawing conclusions about intent and reliance from an imperfectly delineated record. We take shelter instead under the familiar principle that where an appeal presents a difficult jurisdictional issue, yet the substantive merits underlying the issue are facilely resolved in favor of the party challenging jurisdiction, the jurisdictional inquiry may be avoided. See Norton v. Mathews, 427 U.S. 524, 530-32, 96 S.Ct. 2771, 2774-76, 49 L.Ed.2d 672 (1976); Secretary of the Navy v. Avrech, 418 U.S. 676, 677-78, 94 S.Ct. 3039, 3039-40, 41 L.Ed.2d 1033 (1974) (per curiam); In re Pioneer Ford Sales, Inc. 729 F.2d 27, 31 (1st Cir.1984). Because the district court's order dismissing appellant's post-1965 intentional misrepresentation claims was flawless, we leave the jurisdictional question unanswered. 12 B. The Scope of Palmer Preemption. 13 Giving due suzerainty to this circuit's existing precedent, appellant's post-1965 claims for intentional misrepresentation were, as the lower court ruled, plainly preempted by the Labeling Act. The Act provides: 14 No requirement or prohibition based on smoking and health shall be imposed under State law with respect to the advertising or promotion of any cigarettes the packages of which are labeled in conformity with the provisions of this chapter. 15 15 U.S.C. Sec. 1334(b). 3 In Palmer, a panel of this court concluded that, though section 1334(b) does not explicitly pretermit common law liability claims, preemption is implicit in the Act as a whole. See Palmer, 825 F.2d at 625. In reaching this conclusion, Palmer found particularly helpful the straightforward and unambiguous language of the Act setting forth its purpose: the balancing of health protection and trade protection. Id. at 626. Because this equipoise was so intricately crafted, it would be inconceivable that Congress intended to have that carefully wrought balance of national interests superseded by the views of a single state, indeed, perhaps of a single jury in a single state.... To permit the interposition of state common law actions into a well-defined area of federal regulation would abrogate utterly the established scheme of health protection as tempered by trade protection. Id. 16 Appellant challenges the hegemony of Palmer on two grounds. First, she reads Palmer as not banning intentional misrepresentation claims. Alternatively, she maintains that Palmer must be reconsidered in light of English v. General Electric Co., --- U.S. ----, 110 S.Ct. 2270, 110 L.Ed.2d 65 (1990). Neither point is persuasive. 17 1. The Applicability of Palmer. The theory underlying Kotler's misrepresentation claims was that, in the post-1965 era, the cigarette companies' purposeful misrepresentations undermined the effectiveness of the aposematic statements required by the Labeling Act. Fleshing out her claims, Kotler averred that the appellees, while promoting their products as desirable, sexy, exciting, sophisticated, and glamorous, misled people into believing that they were safe. She further alleged that the appellees knew or should have known the grave dangers of cigarette use, yet failed adequately to communicate information about these perilous effects beyond the federally mandated warnings. Instead, appellees' advertising was cleverly constructed to vitiate the efficacy of those warnings. 18 Palmer does not explicitly foreclose the maintenance of such an action; the only claims that Palmer, on its facts, held to be preempted were state-law claims of inadequate warning. Palmer, 825 F.2d at 629. But the Palmer court's reasoning, fairly read, necessarily extends to claims regarding the propriety of advertising, at least insofar as the advertising is attacked on grounds related to the interconnection between smoking and health. After all, Palmer characterized the federal regulatory program established by the Labeling Act as conspicuously fail[ing] to provide any role for the states in the area of cigarette labeling and advertising, id. at 628; and, in framing the preemption inquiry, Palmer included the propriety of advertising as one component. See id. at 621. The court's analysis leads inexorably to the conclusion that when a state tort claim is based on the propriety of cigarette advertising, the claim is preempted. 19 Following the threads embedded in the Palmer tapestry erases any genuine doubt. The primary method by which the Labeling Act achieves its purpose of balancing health protection with trade protection is by requiring warnings on cigarette packaging and advertisements. If this equipoise will be set askew by state tort claims branding federally mandated warnings as inadequate, id. at 626, then the balance will equally be tipped by state tort claims that posit improper advertising as undermining the adequacy of federally mandated warnings. Accord Pennington v. Vistron Corp., 876 F.2d 414, 421 n. 9 (5th Cir.1989); Stephen v. American Brands, Inc., 825 F.2d 312, 313 (11th Cir.1987) (per curiam); Cipollone v. Liggett Group, Inc., 789 F.2d 181, 187 (3d Cir.1986), cert. denied, 479 U.S. 1043, 107 S.Ct. 907, 93 L.Ed.2d 857 (1987). At bottom, appellant's misrepresentation claims are just another species of state tort claims which, like those outlawed in Palmer, are founded on the adequacy of, and ultimately founder upon, the federal warnings. See Cipollone v. Liggett Group, Inc., 893 F.2d 541, 582 (3d Cir.1990) (holding intentional misrepresentation claims to be preempted by the Labeling Act). The district court properly determined such claims, and all others which allege post-1965 failure to warn or which otherwise necessarily depend upon a showing that the labelling or advertising used by defendants was inadequate or improper, Kotler I, 685 F.Supp. at 20, to be within Palmer 's preemptive sweep. 4 20 2. Palmer's Continuing Vitality. We turn next to appellant's assault on the wisdom and continued vitality of Palmer. At the outset, we reiterate that panels of this circuit are bound by the decisions of prior panels unless there is supervening authority compelling a contrary result. See Jusino v. Zayas, 875 F.2d 986, 993 (1st Cir.1989) (citing cases). Appellant argues that English, --- U.S. ----, 110 S.Ct. 2270, handed down by the High Court after we decided Palmer, constitutes such a supervening precedent. We disagree. 21 English held that a state-law claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress was not preempted by section 210 of the Energy Reorganization Act under either an occupation of the field or actual conflict preemption analysis. The Court ruled that there was no field preemption where the claim's effect on the federal regulatory scheme would be neither direct nor substantial enough to place [it] in the preempted field, id. 110 S.Ct. at 2278; and that maintenance of the claim did not actually conflict with the statute, id. at 2279-80. We are at a loss to see how these holdings call Palmer into legitimate question. 22 To be sure, the Palmer panel eschewed a characterization of its preemption finding as either field occupation or direct conflict, instead inquiring whether the state-law claim disturb[ed] too much the congressionally declared scheme. Palmer, 825 F.2d at 626. Be that as it may, the panel necessarily engaged in the English inquiry of whether the challenged state-law claims directly and substantially affected the federal regulatory scheme. 5 Moreover, English was premised on no new doctrine, being strongly suggested by the Court's earlier decision in Silkwood v. Kerr-McGee Corp., 464 U.S. 238, 104 S.Ct. 615, 78 L.Ed.2d 443 (1984). See English, 110 S.Ct. at 2278. The Palmer court carefully distinguished Silkwood in terms of the gaping differences between the Labeling Act and the Atomic Energy Act (at issue in Silkwood ), 6 and relied heavily on the clear statutory language regarding preemptive intent found in the Labeling Act, determining that the asserted state-law claims threw a monkey wrench into the Act's balancing mechanism. 23 That the English Court found a totally different type of tort claim not preempted under a totally different statutory scheme sheds little or no light on the correctness of Palmer 's core holding. It is far more important, we suggest, that English and Palmer applied compatible legal standards. Conceptually, these cases do not conflict. We are, therefore, bound to follow our prior precedent (which is closely in point).