Torts - Cases, Principles, and Institutions Fifth Edition, 2016a

Witt & Tani, TCPI 9. Liability without Fault?
Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966. The standard, FMVSS 208, required auto manufacturers to
equip some but not all of their 1987 vehicles with passive restraints. We ask whether the Act preempts
a state common-law tort action in which the plaintiff claims that the defendant auto
manufacturer, who was in compliance with the standard, should nonetheless have equipped a
1987 automobile with airbags. We conclude that the Act, taken together with FMVSS 208, preempts
the lawsuit.
In 1992, petitioner Alexis Geier, driving a 1987 Honda Accord, collided with a tree and
was seriously injured. The car was equipped with manual shoulder and lap belts which Geier had
buckled up at the time. The car was not equipped with airbags or other passive restraint devices.
Geier and her parents, also petitioners, sued the car’s manufacturer, American Honda
Motor Company, Inc., and its affiliates (hereinafter American Honda), under District of Columbia
tort law. They claimed, among other things, that American Honda had designed its car
negligently and defectively because it lacked a driver’s side airbag.
We first ask whether the Safety Act’s express pre-emption provision pre-empts this tort
action. The provision reads as follows:
Whenever a Federal motor vehicle safety standard established under this subchapter
is in effect, no State or political subdivision of a State shall have any authority either
to establish, or to continue in effect, with respect to any motor vehicle or item of
motor vehicle equipment[,] any safety standard applicable to the same aspect of
performance of such vehicle or item of equipment which is not identical to the
Federal standard.
[T]he Act contains another provision . . . . That provision, a “saving” clause, says that
“[c]ompliance with” a federal safety standard “does not exempt any person from any liability
under common law.” The saving clause assumes that there are some significant number of
common-law liability cases to save. . . .
The two provisions, read together, reflect a neutral policy, not a specially favorable or
unfavorable policy, toward the application of ordinary conflict pre-emption principles. On the
one hand, the pre-emption provision itself reflects a desire to subject the industry to a single,
uniform set of federal safety standards. Its pre-emption of all state standards, even those that
might stand in harmony with federal law, suggests an intent to avoid the conflict, uncertainty,
cost, and occasional risk to safety itself that too many different safety-standard cooks might
otherwise create. This policy by itself favors pre-emption of state tort suits, for the rules of law
that judges and juries create or apply in such suits may themselves similarly create uncertainty
and even conflict, say, when different juries in different States reach different decisions on similar
facts.
On the other hand, the saving clause reflects a congressional determination that occasional
nonuniformity is a small price to pay for a system in which juries not only create, but also enforce,
safety standards, while simultaneously providing necessary compensation to victims. That policy
by itself disfavors pre-emption, at least some of the time. But we can find nothing in any natural
reading of the two provisions that would favor one set of policies over the other where a juryimposed
safety standard actually conflicts with a federal safety standard. . . .
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