884
Opinion of the Court
We have no reason to suspect that the Solicitor General's representation of DOT's views reflects anything other than "the agency's fair and considered judgment on the matter." Auer v. Robbins, 519 U. S. 452, 461-462 (1997); cf. Hillsborough County, supra, at 721 (expressing reluctance, in the absence of strong evidence, to find an actual conflict between state law and federal regulation where agency that promulgated the regulation had not, at the time the regulation was promulgated or subsequently, concluded that such a conflict existed). The failure of the Federal Register to address pre-emption explicitly is thus not determinative.
The dissent would require a formal agency statement of pre-emptive intent as a prerequisite to concluding that a conflict exists. It relies on cases, or portions thereof, that did not involve conflict pre-emption. See post, at 908-909; California Coastal Comm'n v. Granite Rock Co., 480 U. S. 572, 583 (1987); Hillsborough, supra, at 718. And conflict preemption is different in that it turns on the identification of "actual conflict," and not on an express statement of preemptive intent. English, supra, at 78-79; see Hillsborough, supra, at 720-721; Jones, 430 U. S., at 540-543. While "[p]re-emption fundamentally is a question of congressional intent," English, supra, at 78, this Court traditionally distinguishes between "express" and "implied" pre-emptive intent, and treats "conflict" pre-emption as an instance of the latter. See, e. g., Freightliner, 514 U. S., at 287; English, supra, at 78-79; see also Cipollone, supra, at 545, 547-548 (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment in part and dissenting in part). And though the Court has looked for a specific statement of preemptive intent where it is claimed that the mere "volume and complexity" of agency regulations demonstrate an implicit intent to displace all state law in a particular area, Hillsborough, supra, at 717; see post, at 908-909, n. 23— so-called "field pre-emption"—the Court has never before required a specific, formal agency statement identifying conflict in order to conclude that such a conflict in fact exists.
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