Supreme Court rejects Maine law regulating tobacco deliveries
The U.S. Supreme Court has unanimously rejected provisions of a 2003 Maine law that regulated trucking and small package delivery companies in an attempt to prevent tobacco from getting into the hands of minors.
Federal law prohibits states from enacting their own statutes related to motor carrier “price, route or service,” said the high court in the case Rowe v. New Hampshire Motor Transport Association.
Maine’s tobacco delivery law required companies that sell tobacco over the Internet that would be shipped into Maine to be licensed by the state and to only use delivery companies that would require recipients to show they were not minors.
Carriers were forbidden to carry tobacco unless either the sender or receiver had a Maine license. Carriers would know a package was legal if it had the name and license of a Maine-licensed dealer on the package, and carriers would also receive a list of unlicensed tobacco retailers from Maine’s attorney general to check packages against.
The court said that when Congress deregulated trucking through the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, it “sought to pre-empt state trucking regulation” as it did state regulation of aviation when it passed the Airline Deregulation Act in 1978.
Explaining why it struck down the Maine Law, the Supreme Court cited its 1992 decision in Morales v. Trans World Airlines. In Morales it found the Airline Deregulation Act included pre-emption provision prohibiting states from enforcing any law having to do with price, route or service “to ensure that the states would not undo federal deregulation with regulation of their own.”
The court said carrier associations as well as the Bush administration’s Solicitor General claimed the Maine law required carriers to offer a system of services that the market does not now provide.
It would also impose on carriers civil liability not only for knowingly transporting unlicensed tobacco, but also for a carrier’s failure to sufficiently examine every package.
“To allow Maine to insist that carriers provide a special checking system would allow other states to do the same,” the Supreme Court said. And that could lead to a “patchwork” of state laws that the Supreme Court said was “inconsistent with Congress; major legislative effort to leave such decisions, where federally unregulated, to the competitive marketplace.”
Despite the importance of Maine’s public health objective in trying to prohibit underage smoking, the court said “we cannot agree with Maine that the federal law creates an exception on that basis, exempting state laws that it would otherwise pre-empt.”
Clayton Boyce, a spokesman for the American Trucking Associations, said his group was very pleased with the law because it made clear that the “federal government has the top role in regulating interstate commerce — rates, routes and services.”
If all 50 states could set up separate regulatory schemes, he said it would be “a nightmare for national commerce.”
The decision may also have implications on other local government agency efforts to assert controls over the trucking industry.
Curtis Whalen, executive director of the Intermodal Motor Carrier Conference, said the Supreme Court’s decision clearly identifies Congress’ pre-emption goal to be an assurance that carrier rates, routes and services are structured via “competitive market forces” and not because of governmental commands.
Whalen also points out that in the decision the court found that the preemption should be applied to any state law “having a connection with or reference to carrier rates, routes, or services” and that state laws having only an “indirect effect” on those elements of a carrier’s operations are preempted if they have a significant impact.
The decision, said Whalen, could provide ammunition against other local governmental efforts to impose local control on the trucking industry, such as recent moves by ports on the West Coast to reshape local port drayage fleets.
“The decision’s broad application of the scope of preemption under the statute and its clear protection of motor carrier’s ability to structure their rates, routes, and services free of government interference provide strong precedent for potential challenges to other state provisions that intrude into those protected areas,” Whalen said.
The IMCC, among other industry groups, has threatened litigation over a nearly year-long effort by Southern California ports to regulate which trucks can and cannot operate within the two neighboring ports. On Tuesday, the Port of Long Beach approved the final components of their version of the two ports $2.2 billion five-year truck plan. Long Beach officials, however, chose to remove a contentious labor component that had been at the heart of the industry’s call for litigating the plan. Los Angeles officials, who have yet to approve their version of the plan, have indicated they will remain committed to the labor component.
A group of industry organizations representing retailers is still considering a suit over a previously approved portion of the Southern California truck plan that imposed a $35-per-TEU tax on containers moving through the ports. The ports said that the tax is needed to fund the overall truck plan. ' Chris Dupin andKeith Higginbotham