288
Opinion of the Court
pre-emptive scope of the two statutes at issue was governed by the language in each Act. That conclusion rested on a familiar canon of statutory construction and on the absence of any reason to infer any broader pre-emption. Instead of announcing a categorical rule precluding the coexistence of express and implied pre-emption, however, the relevant passage in the opinion stated:
"In our opinion, the pre-emptive scope of the 1965 Act and the 1969 Act is governed entirely by the express language in § 5 of each Act. When Congress has considered the issue of pre-emption and has included in the enacted legislation a provision explicitly addressing that issue, and when that provision provides a 'reliable indicium of congressional intent with respect to state authority,' Malone v. White Motor Corp., 435 U. S., at 505, 'there is no need to infer congressional intent to preempt state laws from the substantive provisions' of the legislation. California Federal Savings & Loan Assn. v. Guerra, 479 U. S. 272, 282 (1987) (opinion of Marshall, J.). Such reasoning is a variant of the familiar principle of expressio unius est exclusio alterius: Congress' enactment of a provision defining the pre-emptive reach of a statute implies that matters beyond that reach are not pre-empted. In this case, the other provisions of the 1965 and 1969 Acts offer no cause to look beyond § 5 of each Act. Therefore, we need only identify the domain expressly pre-empted by each of those sections. As the 1965 and 1969 provisions differ substantially, we consider each in turn." Id., at 517.
The fact that an express definition of the pre-emptive reach of a statute "implies"—i. e., supports a reasonable inference—that Congress did not intend to pre-empt other matters does not mean that the express clause entirely fore-closes any possibility of implied pre-emption. Indeed, just two paragraphs after the quoted passage in Cipollone, we
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