Cipollone v. Liggett Group, Inc., 505 U.S. 504, 47 (1992)

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550

CIPOLLONE v. LIGGETT GROUP, INC.

Opinion of Scalia, J.

tified by the Act's statement of purposes, which, as the Court notes, expresses concern with "diverse, nonuniform, and confusing cigarette labeling and advertising regulations." 15 U. S. C. § 1331(2) (emphasis added). That statement of purposes was left untouched by Congress in 1969, and thus should be as restrictive of the scope of the later § 5(b) as the Court believes it is of the scope of the earlier one.2

To the extent petitioner's claims are premised specifically on respondents' failure (during the period in which the 1965 Act was in force) to include in their advertising any statement relating to smoking and health, I would find those claims, no less than the similar post-1969 claims, pre-empted. In addition, for reasons I shall later explain, see Part III, infra, I would find pre-emption even of those claims based on respondents' failure to make health-related statements to consumers outside their advertising. However, since § 5(b) of the 1965 Act enjoins only those laws that require "statement[s]" in cigarette advertising, those of petitioner's claims that, if accepted, would penalize statements voluntarily made by the cigarette companies must be deemed to survive. As these would appear to include petitioner's breach-of-express-warranty and intentional fraud and misrepresentation claims, I concur in the Court's judgment in this respect.

2 The Court apparently thinks that because § 4 of the Act, imposing the federal package-labeling requirement, "itself sets forth a particular statement," ante, at 519, n. 16, § 5(b), the advertising pre-emption provision must be read to proscribe only those state laws that compel the use of particular statements in advertising. Besides being a complete non sequitur, this reasoning proves too much: The similar prescription of a particular warning in the 1969 Act would likewise require us to confine the pre-emptive scope of that later statute to specific, prescriptive "requirement[s] or prohibition[s]" (which, I presume, would not include tort-law obligations to warn consumers about product dangers). And under both the 1965 and 1969 versions of the Act, the package-labeling pre-emption provision of § 5(a), no less than the advertising pre-emption provision of §5(b), would have to be limited to the prescription of particular language, leaving the States free to impose general health-labeling requirements. These results are obviously contrary to the Act's stated purposes.

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