Cite as: 505 U. S. 504 (1992)
Opinion of the Court
seded only positive enactments by legislatures or administrative agencies that mandate particular warning labels.15
This reading comports with the 1965 Act's statement of purpose, which expressed an intent to avoid "diverse, nonuniform, and confusing cigarette labeling and advertising regulations with respect to any relationship between smoking and health." Read against the backdrop of regulatory activity undertaken by state legislatures and federal agencies in response to the Surgeon General's report, the term "regulation" most naturally refers to positive enactments by those bodies, not to common-law damages actions.
The regulatory context of the 1965 Act also supports such a reading. As noted above, a warning requirement promulgated by the FTC and other requirements under consideration by the States were the catalyst for passage of the 1965 Act. These regulatory actions animated the passage of § 5, which reflected Congress' efforts to prevent "a multiplicity of State and local regulations pertaining to labeling of cigarette packages," H. R. Rep. No. 449, 89th Cong., 1st Sess., 4 (1965), and to "preemp[t] all Federal, State, and local authorities from requiring any statement relating to smoking and health in the advertising of cigarettes." Id., at 5 (emphasis supplied).16
For these reasons, we conclude that § 5 of the 1965 Act only pre-empted state and federal rulemaking bodies from
15 Cf. Banzhaf v. FCC, 132 U. S. App. D. C. 14, 405 F. 2d 1082 (1968) (holding that 1965 Act did not pre-empt FCC's fairness policy as applied to cigarette advertising), cert. denied, 396 U. S. 842 (1969).
16 Justice Scalia takes issue with our narrow reading of the phrase "No statement." His criticism, however, relies solely on an interpretation of those two words, artificially severed from both textual and legislative context. As demonstrated above, the phrase "No statement" in § 5(b) refers to the similar phrase in § 5(a), which refers in turn to § 4, which itself sets forth a particular statement. This context, combined with the regulatory setting in which Congress acted, establishes that a narrow reading of the phrase "No statement" is appropriate.
519
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