Buckman extended: federal preemption of state fraud-on-the-FDA statutes

A number of states have enacted statutes that provide protection to drug manufacturers in product liability actions. Additionally, several of these states have enacted "fraud-on-the-FDA" statutory provisions, which remove statutory protection afforded to drug manufacturers in product liability actions if plaintiffs can provide evidence that the drug manufacturer made misrepresentations to the FDA during the process of obtaining marketing approval for the drug. Currently, the federal circuits are in disagreement over whether these state "fraud-on-the-FDA" statutes should be federally preempted. This issue warrants resolution for drug manufacturers, private citizens, and state legislatures. This Comment will discuss the history and role of the FDA's authority in drug and medical device regulation; federal preemption generally and the Supreme Court's decisions that considered whether state law failure to warn claims are federally preempted in the context of drugs and medical devices; the Supreme Court's decision in Buckman v. Plaintiffs' Legal Committee, where the Court held that claims that a medical device manufacturer made fraudulent representations to the FDA were federally preempted because such claims interfered with the relationship between the FDA and the entities it regulated, state fraud-on-the-FDA statutory provisions, and the existing circuit split regarding whether those statutes should be federally preempted; the potential resolutions to the circuit split; and will conclude and advocate that the Supreme Court's Buckman holding be applied to federally preempt state fraud-on-the-FDA statutes because such statutes involve the relationship between a federal agency and the entity it regulates and thus undermine the FDA's authority.