GLORIA GAIL KURNS, EXECUTRIX OF THE ESTATE OF GEORGE M. CORSON, DECEASED, ET AL., Petitioners v. RAILROAD FRICTION PRODUCTS CORPORATION ET AL. U.S. Supreme Court. Case No. 10-879. Argued November 9, 2011 — Decided February 29, 2012. On Writ of Certiorari to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
Syllabus
George Corson worked as a welder and machinist for a railroad carrier. After retirement, Corson was diagnosed with mesothelioma. He and his wife, a petitioner here, sued respondents Railroad Friction Products Corporation and Viad Corp in state court, claiming injury from Corson’s exposure to asbestos in locomotives and locomotive parts distributed by respondents. The Corsons alleged state-law claims of defective design and failure to warn of the dangers posed by asbestos. After Corson died, petitioner Kurns, executrix of his estate, was substituted as a party. Respondents removed the case to the Federal District Court, which granted them summary judgment, ruling that the state-law claims were pre-empted by the Locomotive Inspection Act (LIA), 49 U.S.C. §20701 et seq. The Third Circuit affirmed.
Held: Petitioners’ state-law design-defect and failure-to-warn claims fall within the field of locomotive equipment regulation pre-empted by the LIA, as that field was defined in Napier v. Atlantic Coast Line R. Co., 272 U.S. 605. Pp. 2-11.
(a) The LIA provides that a railroad carrier may use or allow to be used a locomotive or tender on its railroad line only when the locomotive or tender and its parts or appurtenances are in proper condition and safe to operate without unnecessary danger of personal injury, have been inspected as required by the LIA and regulations prescribed thereunder by the Secretary of Transportation, and can withstand every test prescribed under the LIA by the Secretary. See §20701. Pp. 2-3.
(b) Congress may expressly pre-empt state law. But even without an express pre-emption provision, state law must yield to a congressional Act to the extent of any conflict with a federal statute, see Crosby v. National Foreign Trade Council, 530 U.S. 363, 372, or when the federal statute’s scope indicates that Congress intended federal law to occupy a field exclusively, see Freightliner Corp. v. Myrick, 514 U.S. 280, 287. This case involves only the latter, so-called “field pre-emption.” Pp. 3-4.
(c) In Napier, this Court held two state laws prescribing the use of locomotive equipment pre-empted by the LIA, concluding that the broad power conferred by the LIA on the Interstate Commerce Commission (the agency then vested with authority to carry out the LIA’s requirements) was a “general one” that “extends to the design, the construction and the material of every part of the locomotive and tender and of all appurtenances.” 272 U.S., at 611. The Court rejected the States’ contention that the scope of the pre-empted field was to “be determined by the object sought through legislation, rather than the physical elements affected by it,” id., at 612, and found it dispositive that “[t]he federal and state statutes are directed to the same subject — the equipment of locomotives.” Ibid. Pp. 4-5.
