894
Stevens, J., dissenting
without any pre-emption defense—did not provide them with a sufficient incentive to engage in widespread installation of airbags.
Turning to the subject of pre-emption, Honda contends that the Safety Act's pre-emption provision, 15 U. S. C. § 1392(d), expressly pre-empts petitioners' common-law no-airbag claims. It also argues that the claims are in any event impliedly pre-empted because the imposition of liability in cases such as this would frustrate the purposes of Standard 208. I discuss these alternative arguments in turn.
III
When a state statute, administrative rule, or common-law cause of action conflicts with a federal statute, it is axiomatic that the state law is without effect. U. S. Const., Art. VI, cl. 2; Cipollone v. Liggett Group, Inc., 505 U. S. 504, 516 (1992). On the other hand, it is equally clear that the Supremacy Clause does not give unelected federal judges carte blanche to use federal law as a means of imposing their own ideas of tort reform on the States.9 Because of the role of States as separate sovereigns in our federal system, we have long presumed that state laws—particularly those, such as the provision of tort remedies to compensate for personal injuries, that are within the scope of the States' historic police powers—are not to be pre-empted by a federal statute unless it is the clear and manifest purpose of Congress to do so. Medtronic, Inc. v. Lohr, 518 U. S. 470, 485 (1996); Gade v. National Solid Wastes Management Assn., 505 U. S. 88, 116-117 (1992) (Souter, J., dissenting) ("If the [federal] statute's terms can be read sensibly not to have a pre-emptive effect, the presumption controls and no pre-emption may be inferred").
9 Regrettably, the Court has not always honored the latter proposition as scrupulously as the former. See, e. g., Boyle v. United Technologies Corp., 487 U. S. 500 (1988).
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