Seat Belt Suits Pre-empted
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) once again has launched a “pre-emptive” strike against state personal injury suits by inserting a pre-emption provision in a new rule governing seat belt safety, according to consumer and trial lawyer groups.
The rule, known as the “designated seating position” rule, not only revises how it is determined how many seat belts are required in a vehicle, it has language that very specifically would pre-empt state suits related to seat belt injuries.
Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen and a former administrator of NHTSA, said the agency has issued safety standards with such pre-emption language 20 times in the past three years.
“The fear of lawsuits is one of the greatest incentives automakers have to build stronger and safer vehicles,” she said. “For NHTSA to suggest that automakers should have blanket immunity from consumer liability lawsuits means that more defective vehicles will be manufactured, fewer will be recalled, the public will have less information about injury causation and more families will needlessly lose loved ones on our roads each day.”
The business community sees pre-emption differently saying that pre-emption gives them one set of rules to play by instead of having to deal with the federal regulatory system as well as the tort and jury systems.
Came across an interesting article about pre-emption written in January of 2008 – The Emerging Threat of Regulatory Preemption – written by David C. Vladeck. In his article he writes about how pre-emption has been used in four federal agencies: Food & Drug Administration(FDA), Consumer Product safety Commission(CPSC), Federal Railroad Administration(FRA) and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. His conclusion:
While the public watches the Supreme Court wrestle with the preemption questions presented in Reigel v. Medtronic, and perhaps in Wyeth v. Levine, the more troubling action is taking place out of public view. The quiet but insidious erosion of state tort law remedies — and the health and safety benefits that are associated with them — continues unabated. Our health and safety agencies have been subject to a hostile-takeover by an Administration that cares more about constituent-serving outcomes than their statutory mission to protect the public. The winners will be the Administration’s corporate patrons who will be given the immunity from tort liability they never could have gotten from Congress. The loser will be the tens of thousands of Americans injured through no fault of their own but who will no longer have any means of redress.