On February 29, 2012, the Supreme Court affirmed a lower court ruling that the Locomotive Inspection Act preempts a lawsuit under state law brought by the estate of a man who died from mesothelioma. The suit alleged he was exposed to asbestos while working on locomotives in the mid-twentieth century. The defendant companies won a motion to dismiss the suit, with the court ruling that federal law preempted design defect and failure-to-warn lawsuits against companies that supplied asbestos-containing equipment to the railroads.
The Supreme Court ruled that Congress long ago intended that federal law occupy the entire field of law regulating locomotive equipment. The court rejected an attempt to replace this field preemption analysis with a different express preemption or conflict preemption analysis. The Secretary of Transportation is charged with the responsibility to regulate the design, construction and material of every part of a locomotive, and claims involving repair and maintenance fall within the purview of the Secretary’s authority and outside of the reach of tort claims under state law. The decision is critical to thousands of asbestos cases in the railroad industry and helps to insure national uniformity of federal regulation of the industry.
The NAM filed an amicus brief putting this case in the context of current asbestos litigation, and explaining how the plaintiffs were trying to expand asbestos litigation to locomotive equipment manufacturers and distributors despite nearly a century of precedent holding that such claims are preempted. The suit tried to distinguish state statute and regulations from state tort litigation for purposes of preemption, claiming that litigation is not preempted, even though it imposes legal obligations that are equivalent to state "positive" law like statutes. The Supreme Court has already recognized the correctness of preempting tort claims in the context of litigation under the same principles that apply to state statutes and regulations. It did so again in its 6-3 ruling in this case.