Court Opinion

ID: 9478596
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 06:52:47.570615+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:46:30.607859
License: Public Domain

SELYA, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
My brethren today espouse a vision of preemption that I find needlessly wide and a conception of the common law that seemingly misperceives tort as a regulatory system. What is more, this espousal occurs in an arena fraught with political drama— automobile safety regulation — where we should be especially reluctant to insulate administrative decisions from the prophylaxis of the civil jury, thereby placing common law protections beyond the reach of the motoring public. I am not so naive as to question that Congress may, if it chooses, shield its legislative product from unwanted state-law infringement. Short of that, however, the regulatory schematas of administrative agencies should be no less subject to the full panoply of democratic institutions than are the overt acts of other governmental instrumentalities.
While jury verdicts have an admittedly anecdotal quality, they are a core ingredient of our representative democracy, signifying the considered judgment of citizens forced to confront and define the scope of law in action. Because I can discern nei*420ther a clear expression that this tort action has been preempted nor any sufficient reason to imply so drastic a result, I would answer the certified question in the negative and affirm the decision below.
I
We have been asked, in effect, to police the border between two subsections of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966, specifically 15 U.S.C. § 1392(d) (preempting state automobile safety standards) and 15 U.S.C. § 1397(c) (preserving common law remedies).24 With respect, the majority does not so much police the border as displace it, claiming more territory for federal exclusivity than the statute warrants.
My colleagues and I are not entirely at odds. I agree with them that “[preemption is a matter of congressional intent,” ante at 401, and that the statute sub judice is “facially ambiguous”. Id. at 401.25 I depart from their analysis, however, when they purport to resolve that ambiguity with a sojourn through the unknown and the unknowable. I subscribe instead to the Court’s teaching that “[t]he essence of our federal system is that within the realm of authority left open to them under the Constitution, the States must be equally free to engage in any activity that their citizens choose for the common meal, no matter how unorthodox or unnecessary anyone else — including the federal judiciary— deems state involvement to be.” Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Auth., 469 U.S. 528, 546, 105 S.Ct. 1005, 1015, 83 L.Ed.2d 1016 (1985). I am unwilling to find preemption in a case as charged with ambiguity as this one. See Maryland v. Louisiana, 451 U.S. 725, 746, 101 S.Ct. 2114, 2128-29, 68 L.Ed.2d 576 (1981); Rice v. Santa Fe Elevator Corp., 331 U.S. 218, 230, 67 S.Ct. 1146, 1152, 91 L.Ed. 1447 (1947). Rather, I believe, as did the court below, that Massachusetts remains free to impose its common law concepts of tort liability in this area.
The point of reasoned beginning in interpreting a law is the language of the statute itself. United States v. James, 478 U.S. 597, 604, 106 S.Ct. 3116, 3121, 92 L.Ed.2d 483 (1986). In construing statutes, our role is to give effect to them as written and as a whole, not to enforce one section at the expense of another. We must “assume that the legislative purpose is expressed by the ordinary meaning of the words used.” American Tobacco Co. v. Patterson, 456 U.S. 63, 68, 102 S.Ct. 1534, 1537, 71 L.Ed.2d 748 (1982). That canon of construction has particular pertinency here, where both the preemption and savings clauses use the word “any.” The Supreme Court has recently placed special emphasis on that term, remarking that “[i]t is difficult to imagine broader language.” James, 478 U.S. at 604, 106 S.Ct. at 3121 (footnote omitted). Applying its analysis to statutory language dealing with liability, the Court continued: “Congress’ choice of the language ‘any damage’ and ‘liability of any kind’ further undercuts a narrow construction.” Id. at 605, 106 S.Ct. at 3121. (emphasis supplied by the Court).
A savings clause exists as a specific exception to a general preemption clause: it is designed to save a specific subset of legal expressions that would otherwise be preempted.26 Thus, while we are generally *421obligated to give a broad construction to the word “any” as used in the preemption clause, we are specifically obligated to give great breadth to its use in the savings clause.
Even if these canons of construction do not, in and of themselves, suggest the proper resolution of the facial ambiguity in the statute — and I believe they do — they at least inform one’s reading of the legislative history. The majority concludes that “Congress in 1966 did not contemplate the likelihood that there would be a state tort action that would effectively create a state design standard conflicting with a federal safety standard.” Ante at 403. In arriving at this point, my confreres first examine the “historical context of the Safety Act’s enactment in 1966_” Id. at 404. That approach reverses the proper analytic sequence in two ways. For one thing, the legislative history comprises the statements which Congress itself deemed most relevant to statutory understanding. Both legal and historical research techniques suggest that the most relevant materials be analyzed first.27 See, e.g., Blum v. Stenson, 465 U.S. 886, 896, 104 S.Ct. 1541, 1547-48, 79 L.Ed.2d 891 (1984). It is only if a reviewing court needs enlightenment that “outside” historical sources must be plumbed to illuminate the language of the legislative materials.
The second deviation from the proper norm is more subtle. My brethren radically alter the inquiry’s focus by defining the peek into the past in the narrowest conceivable terms {e.g., the historical question deals with “possible preemption of certain defective design actions ... up to 1966,” ante at 404), unabashedly presuming Congress to have been nescient in the face of the dynamic evolution of tort law. Given the level of generality in both the statutory language and the legislative history — a level of generality which appears conceded, see ante at 406 — I think that the better approach is to ask what one means by the general language in the context of legal history circa 1966. That approach grounds the interpretative query in what Congress said, rather than in the “precarious business” of attempting to draw inferences from congressional silence. Symons v. Chrysler Loan Guarantee Board, 670 F.2d 238, 242 (D.C.Cir.1981); see also Capitol Technical Services, Inc. v. FAA, 791 F.2d 964, 971 & n. 42 (D.C.Cir.1986) (same); cf. D. Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies 15-24, 47-48 (1970) (discussing fallacies of fictional question, semantical question, and negative proof).
Try as I might, I can fathom no implicit exception for design defects in the general statements contained in the legislative history.
To the exact contrary, an unbiased glimpse of tort law circa 1966 indicates to me that design defect litigation, although then a relatively recent phenomenon, was not so new as to catch the Congress unawares. Let me illustrate briefly. By 1966, the judiciary had amassed a great deal of experience with design defects in respect to a host of products. When one looks to the intellectual world of tort at that time and seeks to ascertain what was meant by generic references to products liability, the sensible approach is to assume that broad language derives its meaning from the commensurately broad universe of legal practice which informs it. When my colleagues focus on the date of what they term the “seminal decision” in Larsen v. General Motors Corp., 391 F.2d 495 (8th Cir.1968), ante at 404, they imply that the liability it imposed for negligent automo*422tive design sprang full-blown from the collective brows of the Eighth Circuit at that moment. But Larsen did not emerge ex nihilo; the Larsen court simply took what seemed the next logical step in the evolution of tort law. See, e.g., 391 F.2d at 504 (automotive industry not “being singled out for any special adverse treatment; liability for design defects predicated upon established “general negligence principles”).
Fairly read, the Larsen rationale derived from cases, annotations, legislative materials, and scholarly commentary which, by and large, were available in 1966. Moreover, the decision itself took note of the heavy criticism trailing in the wake of Evans v. General Motors Corp., 359 F.2d 822, (7th Cir.), cert. denied, 385 U.S. 836, 87 S.Ct. 83, 17 L.Ed.2d 70 (1966), a pre-Safety Act case holding that an automobile manufacturer could not be held liable for negligence in design. Larsen, 391 F.2d at 505 n. 9. Even if we accept arguendo the majority’s isthmian frame of reference, there is a great deal of evidence that when the general words “common law liability” or “products liability” were used in 1966, they could easily have embraced what the Evans dissent characterized as a “broad national issue” — automobile design defects. Evans, 359 F.2d at 828 (Kiley, J., dissenting). Significantly, Judge Kiley drew attention to the extensive literature then available concerning automobile “safety design and production,” id., and noted that the law was clearly pointing “to[ward] greater responsibility of manufacturers in designing ... products_” Id. at 826.
Indeed, Larsen itself addressed the relationship between NHTSA standards and common law liability with some particularity. Discussing the savings clause, 15 U.S. C. § 1397(c), in the context of a design defect action, the court invoked the general language of common law liability:
It is apparent that the National Traffic Safety Act is intended to be supplementary of and in addition to the common law of negligence and product liability. The common law is not sterile or rigid and serves the best interests of society by adapting standards of conduct and responsibility that fairly meet the emerging and developing needs of our time. The common law standard of a duty to use reasonable care in light of all the circumstances can at least serve the needs of our society until the legislature imposes higher standards or the courts expand the doctrine of strict liability for tort. The Act is a salutary step in this direction and not an exemption from common law liability.
Larsen, 391 F.2d at 506. While I do not regard the Larsen court’s discussion of the interplay among products liability, tort, and regulation as dispositive, such expressions, nearly contemporaneous with passage of the Safety Act, are extremely suggestive. At a distance of some twenty years, I fail to see how we can construe the ordinary language of a statute enacted in 1966 better than a court not twenty months distant.
Given that courts both before and closely after the passage of the Safety Act addressed the question of automobile design defects in general terms, I believe we ought to give the legislative history’s general language the overall meaning that contemporary courts gave it. This is especially so since Congress could hardly have been blind and deaf to the transformation that tort law had undergone in the preceding decades. Congress made no specific exception for products liability for design defects, and we disserve the proper performance of our role by carving such an exception against the grain of history. At the very least, the usage of the times suggests sufficient ambiguity in legislative history and historical context to require us to resolve the amphiboly based on the canons of statutory interpretation earlier discussed. See supra at 420-421 & n. 26. While I am not an historian, I believe that the mood in 1966 was both different and more fluid than my colleagues portray when they selectively scrutinize the history of design defect actions generally28 and *423then proceed to conflate that history with developments in the automotive industry.
The history of tort law over the period in question has been the subject of much scholarly attention in recent years. The sum of the relevant scholarship makes me less sanguine than my brethren that Congress, in 1966, was ignorant of the impact of design defect actions. The general consensus seems clear: “Since 1960, our modern civil liability regime has experienced a conceptual revolution that is among the most dramatic ever witnessed in the Anglo-American legal system.” Priest, The Invention of Enterprise Liability: A Critical History of the Intellectual Foundations of Modem Tort Law, 15 J.Leg.Stud. 461, 461 (1985); G. White, Tort Law in America: An Intellectual History 168-73, 197-208 (1980) (similar). In Professor Priest’s view, product defect claims, based on the theory that an enterprise should internalize the costs of accidents resulting from failings in its wares, were fully “synthesized” and generally accepted by 1965. Priest, op. cit. supra, at 505-18. And by then, although the definition of defective design was not firmly established, the commentators had begun to urge, and some courts had begun to adopt, expansive definitions. Id. at 521-28; see also Noel, Recent Trends in Manufacturer’s Negligence as to Design, Instructions or Warnings, 19 Sw.LJ. 43, 47-48 51-60 (1965); Noel, Manufacturer’s Negligence of Design or Directions for Use of a Product, 71 Yale L.J. 816 (1962). The evolving scholarship itself acted as a stimulus for rapid doctrinal change in the area of products liability. See White, op. cit. supra, at 168. The Safety Act was passed in the midst of just such turbulent change. Had Congress wanted to separate the spheres of common law and federal regulation corn-pletely, it knew how to do so. It chose instead repeatedly to use the general language of tort, fashioning no such clear dichotomy as my colleagues now divine. The statutory framework, the language of the Act, the historical antecedents which pertain, and the tenor of the legal times coalesce to convince me that Congress, when enacting this law, did not intend to restrict the evolution of tort, much less to restrict it by way of preemption.
II
Notwithstanding that the savings clause deserves fuller effect, it can still be preempted if the cause of action which plaintiffs endeavor to assert “stands as an obstacle to the accomplishment of the full purposes and objectives of Congress.” Schneidewind v. ANR Pipeline Co., — U.S. -, 108 S.Ct. 1145, 1151, 99 L.Ed.2d 316 (1988); see also San Diego Building Trades Council v. Garmon, 359 U.S. 236, 247, 79 S.Ct. 773, 780-81, 3 L.Ed.2d 775 (1959); Palmer v. Liggett Group, Inc., 825 F.2d 620, 626 (1st Cir.1987). Yet, mindful that the savings clause must, for the reasons stated in Part I hereof, preserve the widest possible range of causes of action not in conflict with the safety standard, I believe the plaintiffs complaint passes muster.
Let me start this segment of the analysis by noting my frank disagreement with the majority when it professes to see no difference between direct regulation and the indirect regulatory effect of tort law vis-a-vis this case. See ante at 410-14. While I have no wish to indulge — let alone sponsor —an arid jurisprudential debate, I think *424there is a meaningful distinction. Direct regulation comprises a set of commands which all must obey, and thereby overrides both economic and noneconomic considerations. Tort law regulates not by obligation, but by suasion; though it lacks the power to command behavioral modifications, it affects the economics of production and consumption, thereby acquiring considerable persuasive impact. The spectre of potential tort liability forces a firm to choose how best to respond to liability costs and, depending upon market conditions, how to allocate those costs among consumers and shareholders. Put another way, compliance with a course of action mandated by actual regulation is a given; compliance with a course of action suggested by the spectre of tort liability, or not, is a choice constrained by economic factors.
In that sense, tort operates to change the background costs of the manufacturer’s design decisions. And, the resultant choice— say, to install airbags or forgo them — is not a pure one-for-one choice, for all background costs, not just tort liability, influence design decisions. So viewed, every election which a manufacturer makes among the options available under the safety standard is governed by a variegated economic mix.
Because a manufacturer’s choice is in this sense never a “free” choice, the analogy which the majority draws to the colorful rhetoric of Palmer seems badly skewed.29 Palmer was a cigarette warning case where, absent preemption, defendant would have been faced with a Hobson’s choice: it could avoid future liability only by adding a new warning label, one not within the prescription of 15 U.S.C. § 1333. This case does not pose that sort of dilemma for General Motors. Here, defendant can avoid liability by choosing an option which NHTSA (and even Congress, see Pacific Legal Foundation v. Dep’t of Transportation, 593 F.2d 1338, 1342 n. 29 (D.C.Cir.) (Congress did not exercise its option to veto gradual introduction of passive restraints, including airbags) cert. denied, 444 U.S. 830, 100 S.Ct. 57, 62 L.Ed.2d 38 (1979)), has approved. Unlike cigarette warnings— where the labels required would have “contravene[d] the Act’s policy of uniform label-ings,” 825 F.2d at 627—the statute here in play provides only for “minimum” safety standards. See 15 U.S.C. § 1391(2). I fully agree that any state holding that covered the same aspect of performance as the safety standard in question and that would have the effect of requiring something other than a permitted statutory option would —and should — be preempted as non-identical. But that is some other case — not this one. As the majority concedes, “the standards are ‘minimum’ in the sense that a manufacturer may make a vehicle safer than required by federal law....” Ante at 414. The instant case is thus at a sizable remove from Palmer. Absolutely no conflict exists between federal law and state tort law when the latter allows for the imposition of damages; the economic calculus changes, to be sure — but the change does little more than counsel that the wiser course for the manufacturer may be to alter or expand its selection among the choices legitimately available to it.
Perhaps the root cause of my fellow panelists’ objection to allowing a suit like this one to go forward is the concern that different juries in different locales may choose differently among the statutory options, see ante at 400, thus “requiring” a manufacturer to implement all three of the permissible safety systems. This, it is intimated, would frustrate NHTSA’s apparent purpose of providing manufacturers a choice. But that objection is something of a heuristic. In the first place, NHTSA’s method must be in service to the aim of the statute. In the second place, the contention that variation in verdicts would destroy uniformity holds very little water. And finally, the effect of requiring any particular option may be such as to allow a manufacturer to absorb or pass along liability costs from suits based on lack of the *425remaining options. Let me amplify on these three lines of response.
1. Aim of the Statute. In line with the enabling legislation itself, NHTSA’s decision to allow manufacturers to exercise an option must be designed to save lives and reduce injuries. The regulation itself tells the tale:
The purpose of this standard is to reduce the number of deaths of vehicle occupants, and the severity of injuries ... by specifying equipment requirements for active and passive restraint systems.
49 C.F.R. § 571.208 (1976). One searches in vain for anything in the statute or the standard intimating that the provision of choice to the manufacturer is an “objective of federal law.” Silkwood v. Kerr-McGee Corp., 464 U.S. 238, 256, 104 S.Ct. 615, 625-26, 78 L.Ed.2d 443 (1984). If no such objective can be discerned, then a fortiori, the statute cannot be frustrated by allowing state tort laws to operate. Given that the option is simply in service to the statutory and regulatory objective actually stated, that is, safety, I can perceive no irreconcilable conflict which would stem from court decisions in cases like this one. Damage suits will tend to encourage safety, not countervail it. Adjudications adverse to manufacturers would likely have the effect of implementing the safety standard in toto.
Texas & Pacific Ry Co. v. Abilene Cotton Oil Co., 204 U.S. 426, 27 S.Ct. 350, 51 L.Ed. 553 (1907), is not to the contrary. Abilene arose out of a scenario wherein the Interstate Commerce Commission had been empowered to set “reasonable” freight rates and railroads were required to charge accordingly. Id. at 437-38, 27 S.Ct. at 354-55. To allow juries to find other rates “reasonable” would have resulted in the “absolute destruction of the act.” Id. at 440, 27 S.Ct. at 355. But in the case at bar, unlike in Abilene, the suggested tort action is not “wholly inconsistent with the administrative power.” Id. at 441, 27 S.Ct. at 355. As I have pointed out, all three options contained in FMVSS 208 are statutorily and administratively legitimate and, as the majority concedes, ante at 414, could be utilized coactively by defendant if it chose to do so.
I am also unpersuaded that International Paper v. Ouellette, 479 U.S. 481, 107 S.Ct. 805, 93 L.Ed.2d 883 (1987), compels the majority’s result. Ouellette is dependent upon the wording of the idiosyncratic savings clause there at issue and presents, at bottom, a question of which state-law actions survive in the face of federal regulation — not a question of whether any state-law actions survive at all. Not only did the Ouellette Court act to preserve certain state-law claims, but it also decreed Vermont law preempted solely because its application would “allow respondents to circumvent the NPDES permit system, thereby upsetting the balance of public and private interests so carefully addressed by the [Clean Water] Act.” Id. at 494, 107 S.Ct. at 813. In this case, General Motors cannot so facilely escape the administrative scheme; all of its choices stem from acceptable options. The interest balance — public/private — remains unaffected. Under the Clean Water Act, after all, a state was given the right to exceed federal standards for pollution sources within its jurisdiction. Id. at 489-90, 107 S.Ct. at 810-11. Under the Safety Act, the states lack even that power; the sovereignty of each state, the implicit concern of the Ouellette Court, id. at 495, 107 S.Ct. at 813, remains uncom-promised by validating the tort law of Massachusetts.
2. Uniformity. I find my colleagues’ fear that maintenance of this action will destroy uniformity, see, e.g., ante at 406-407, 412-413, to be unfounded. They point to nothing in the voluminous record which so much as suggests that installation of any one or more of the proffered options makes installation of any of the others impossible. Unless a manufacturer wilfully attempted to engineer different modes of compliance for each jurisdiction, an act which would be tantamount to economic self-immolation, nothing about the “centralized, mass production, high volume character” of the industry_,” ante at 412 (citation omitted), would be compromised. A manufacturer would never be in the position of having to implement contradictory *426safety features, nor could it ever be faced with one state’s safety “maximum” and another’s conflicting “minimum.” In no meaningful sense would uniformity be threatened; in the worst-case scenario— “worst” from the manufacturer’s viewpoint —self-interest would require either concurrent implementation of the FMVSS 208 options or payment of whatever damage awards (if any) might accrue. Such a result does not create an irreconcilable conflict between the federal regulatory scheme and state common law. See Wood v. General Motors Corp., 673 F.Supp. 1108, 1114-16 (D.Mass.1987) (explaining why potential for damage award under state law is not incompatible with FMVSS 208; citing relevant authority).
3. Cost Considerations. In the last analysis, the likelihood that all three options could ever be required, in the sense that tort law ever “requires” anything to be done, seems remote. The synergy inherent in, for example, adding airbags to an automobile that already has manual belts with warning systems, would likely be enormous. Under such circumstances, neglect to furnish the incremental protection of the additional (third) option might well yield such small liability losses that manufacturers could logically rate the game as eminently worth the candle. This assertion, to be sure, has a speculative quality. But that, perhaps, is the point: it is no less problematic than the chain of conjectural inferences put together by my colleagues, to the effect that a contrary decision (1) will open the door to statelaw claims, which (2) will be realized in this and countless other actions, (3) yielding damage awards so large as to force car manufacturers to alter their behavior.30
Ill
There is, perhaps, one other observation which should be made. The majority apparently agrees that “compliance with a federal safety standard does not serve as a defense on the merits of a defective design claim.” Ante at 417 (emphasis in original). Yet the abundant caselaw supporting that proposition cannot be reconciled with this court’s opinion today. If compliance is not a defense on the merits, then almost by definition, a successful common law action for inadequate design could force manufacturers to go beyond the safety standards in place under any imaginable federal law. The effect, therefore, would be the same as requiring a non-identical standard covering the same aspect of performance. It would be a strange “savings clause” indeed which could salvage an action on the merits in this fashion but be impuissant to stop preemption, when the effect on uniformity of regulation and manufacture would be precisely the same in either case. Cf. Dawson v. Chrysler Corp., 630 F.2d 950, 953 (3d Cir.1980) (holding that compliance with NHTSA safety standards does not relieve an automobile manufacturer of liability and noting “the troubling public policy dilemma ... that under existing federal law individual juries in the various states are permitted, in effect, to establish national automobile safety standards”), cert. denied, 450 U.S. 959, 101 S.Ct. 1418, 67 L.Ed.2d 383 (1981).
IV
I need go no further. I recognize the closeness of the question and the impreci-sions of the statutory scheme. I understand full well that the balance of policy considerations may have altered since the Safety Act of 1966 was passed. And it can, I suppose, be hypothesized that automobile safety is not today the pressing concern it was in 1966 (although that is not a theorem to which I can willingly subscribe). But the crux of the matter is not whether the majority’s vision may best serve an era in which the regulated are free both to choose safety options which exempt them from the imposed wisdom of juries under the common law and to safeguard their profit margins wherever Con*427gress’s speech is less than explicit. What counts, I suggest, is that Congress did not originally, and has yet to, superimpose that entrepreneurial vision on the Safety Act. Nor do I understand the safety standard promulgated by NHTSA to have done so. Because of those parallel truths, I would affirm the district court and allow this suit to proceed. The plaintiff’s cause of action in tort, held by the trial judge to state a viable claim under the common law of Massachusetts, 673 F.Supp. at 1120, is not preempted.31
I respectfully dissent.

. The pertinent statutory text has been set out in the majority opinion, ante at 402-403; it would be pleonastic to repeat it here.

. It does strike me as curious, however, that having found such ambiguity, the majority expends little effort in trying to reconcile the perceived conflict. See ante at 402-404. Instead, they presume that tort liability in this case would have the same effect as a state safety standard, and then argue that Congress "did not envisage this peculiar type of lawsuit....” Id. at 403. This breathtakingly broad approach seems to me to skip the requisite step of analyzing the statute’s language. Moreover, it dresses Congress in an oversized set of blinders; logically extended, the majority's methodology would freeze "saved” common law actions in the form they existed, or could be envisioned, at the time an act was passed. I refuse to believe that Congress need "envisage” every twist and turn of evolving common law jurisprudence in order to shelter tort liability from preemption.

.One cannot sensibly reverse these roles and read the savings clause as general and the preemption clause as specific. The savings clause, after all, contains the general predicate, “[c]om-*421pliance with any Federal motor vehicle safety standard issued under this chapter_” 15 U.S. C. § 1397(c) (emphasis supplied). Section 1392(d) contains a second general predicate, safety standards "in effect” preempting a State from "establish[ing], or ... continuing in effect" non-identical safety standards "applicable to the same aspect of performance” as the federal standard. The savings clause depends for its meaning on the factual predicates of federal safety standards in effect, complied with, and covering the relevant aspect of performance.

. The order of reference in California Federal Savings & Loan Ass’n v. Guerra, 479 U.S. 272, 284, 107 S.Ct. 683, 691, 93 L.Ed.2d 613 (1987), relied on by the majority, ante at 404, seems to me no accident. A court "must examine the [act’s] language against the background of its legislative history and historical context”. Id.

. No useful purpose would be served by overturning every stone upon which the majority’s view of the mid-1960s rests. It suffices to say that even the sturdiest of my colleagues’ supporting authorities yield interpretations radically at variance with the ones proffered in the *423opinion. See, e.g., Katz, Liability of Automobile Manufacturers For Unsafe Design of Passenger Cars, 69 Harv.L.Rev. 863, 863 n. 5 (1956) (noting that, although “[t]here is a dearth of reported cases where negligence in design was urged by plaintiff as a basis for liability, ... the successful instances appear to be recent...;” the portion which I have underlined plainly suggests a rescent trend which the panel majority inexplicably discounts); Nader and Page, Automobile Design and the Judicial Process, 55 Cal.L.Rev. 645, 645 nn. 3, 4 (1967) (recognizing that design defect actions in the automotive industry were, by 1966, at least occasionally settled and not infrequently successful at the trial level); id. at 669-70 (concluding that inclusion of standards in the Safety Act will spur design defect actions, inasmuch as "[t]he reluctance of the courts to recognize these safety values should vanish, now that they are embodied in statute and regulation”); id. at 674 (concluding that prospective design liability "played some role” in passage of the 1966 Safety Act).

. The exact statement bears repeating. My colleagues argue that, if plaintiffs could pursue this suit, “General Motors’ choice to avoid modification of its design seems akin to ‘the free choice of coming up for air after being underwater.’ Palmer, 825 F.2d at 627.” Ante at 411.

. With respect, my brethren’s approach involves other large chunks of surmise as well, assuming, for instance, that a decision in regard to a 1976 Blazer will be applicable to every car of every make of every year, and that "passive restraints” within the meaning of plaintiffs’ claim in this case will necessarily involve airbags rather than the less expensive belt system.

. The question of whether or not the plaintiffs complaint, preemption aside, adequately limns a state-law claim upon which relief can be granted is not presently before us, and in dissenting, I take no view of that question.