544
Opinion of Scalia, J.
lower courts will encounter in attempting to implement today's decision.
IV
By finding federal pre-emption of certain state common-law damages claims, the decision today eliminates a critical component of the States' traditional ability to protect the health and safety of their citizens. Yet such a radical readjustment of federal-state relations is warranted under this Court's precedents only if there is clear evidence that Congress intended that result. Because I believe that neither version of the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act evidences such a clear congressional intent to pre-empt state common-law damages actions, I respectfully dissent from Parts V and VI of Justice Stevensí opinion.
Justice Scalia, with whom Justice Thomas joins, concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part.
Today's decision announces what, on its face, is an extraordinary and unprecedented principle of federal statutory construction: that express pre-emption provisions must be construed narrowly, "in light of the presumption against the pre-emption of state police power regulations." Ante, at 518. The life span of this new rule may have been blessedly brief, inasmuch as the opinion that gives it birth in Part I proceeds to ignore it in Part V, by adjudging at least some of the common-law tort claims at issue here pre-empted. In my view, there is no merit to this newly crafted doctrine of narrow construction. Under the Supremacy Clause, U. S. Const., Art. VI, cl. 2, our job is to interpret Congress's decrees of pre-emption neither narrowly nor broadly, but in accordance with their apparent meaning. If we did that job in the present case, we would find, under the 1965 Act, preemption of petitioner's failure-to-warn claims; and under the 1969 Act, we would find pre-emption of petitioner's claims complete.
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