WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court gave business two big wins Wednesday by shielding companies from lawsuits and state regulations.
In one ruling, the court said makers of medical devices, such as heart valves and pacemakers, cannot be sued by injured patients if the Food and Drug Administration had approved the devices for sale.
In the second, the court freed shippers and delivery services, such as UPS, from state regulations requiring them to verify that an adult was the recipient of cigarettes delivered to a residence.
In the medical devices case, the court threw out a lawsuit against Medtronic Inc. over a balloon catheter that burst in the chest of a New York man. He underwent emergency surgery and died some time later. His wife sued Medtronic, saying the catheter was defective.
But in an 8-1 decision in Riegel vs. Medtronic, the court rejected her suit, saying juries may not second-guess the FDA on whether such devices were safe.
In the delivery case, Rowe vs. New Hampshire Motor Transport Assn., the court had been urged by the Bush administration and 38 states, led by California, to uphold a Maine law requiring shippers to check that a person receiving cigarettes is an adult.
In this era of Internet commerce, state officials want to make sure minors are not ordering illegal products for themselves. Store clerks have a duty not to sell certain products to minors, and that duty should extend to shippers and delivery services, the states said.
But in a 9-0 ruling, the court said a federal law deregulating the trucking industry swept aside all such state rules, even those designed to protect health and safety.
"You can't have 50 states setting different rules for shipping services. It would result in higher costs and slower service," said Washington lawyer Beth S. Brinkmann, who represented the shipping industry.
In both decisions, the court read federal law broadly to protect companies from juries and state regulators.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the lone dissenter in the Medtronic case, said the court read too much into the law. She said Congress did not intend to shield makers of medical devices from being sued when it adopted federal oversight in 1976.
She called the ruling "a radical curtailment" of the right to "seek compensation for injuries caused by defectively designed . . . medical devices."
