## Facts

- Six-year-old Brittany Carter was severely burned when her five-year-old brother ignited her dress using a BIC J-26 disposable cigarette lighter.
- Brittany’s mother, as next friend, sued BIC under Texas products-liability law alleging design and manufacturing defects and seeking actual and exemplary damages.
- Disposable lighters are regulated under the Consumer Product Safety Act (CPSA) through Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) standards requiring specified levels of child resistance and prescribing testing protocols.
- BIC’s J-26 lighter was designed, tested, and certified as compliant with the federal child-resistance standard.
- A jury found for Carter and awarded $3 million in actual damages and $2 million in exemplary damages; judgment was entered based on both design- and manufacturing-defect findings.
- The court of appeals affirmed on the design-defect theory and did not reach the manufacturing-defect theory.
- BIC sought Texas Supreme Court review raising multiple issues; the Supreme Court addressed only federal preemption of the design-defect claim.

## Issues

1. Whether the CPSA and the CPSC’s child-resistance standard preempt a Texas common-law design-defect claim alleging that a federally compliant disposable lighter should have been designed to be more child-resistant.

## Decision

- The Texas Supreme Court held that federal law preempted Carter’s state-law design-defect claim.
- The court reversed the court of appeals’ judgment affirming liability on the design-defect theory.
- The court remanded to the court of appeals to consider unresolved issues, including the manufacturing-defect theory and other challenges not previously addressed.

## Legal Principles

- Under the CPSA, once a federal consumer product safety standard addressing a specific risk is in effect, states may not impose nonidentical requirements relating to product design (and related attributes) that address the same risk, absent a statutory exemption process.
- State tort design-defect liability can function as a “requirement” for preemption purposes when it would effectively compel manufacturers to adopt a design different from, or more stringent than, the federal standard to avoid liability.
- The CPSA savings clause preserves state-law remedies only to the extent they do not impose substantive obligations that conflict with, or add to, the federal standard governing the same risk of injury.
- A design-defect claim challenging the adequacy of a federally permitted design is more likely to be preempted than a manufacturing-defect claim alleging deviation from the federally compliant design.

## Conclusion

The court concluded that allowing a jury to impose design-defect liability for a lighter that met the federal child-resistance standard would effectively impose a different child-resistance requirement and disrupt the CPSA’s uniform national regulatory scheme; the design-defect judgment was therefore reversed and the case remanded for consideration of remaining issues.


BIC Pen Corp. v. Carter, 251 S.W.3d 500 (Tex. 2008)