New Legislation to Eliminate the Airlines’ Liability Shield
byPaul Ruden/美国的经济自由项目已宣布了新的立法,以解决联邦抢占州法律造成的问题,以及相关的缺乏私人法律行动权利1978年的原始航空公司放松管法。
这AELP is a non-profit, non-partisan project – essentially a think-tank – working to “combat monopolistic corporations and the systems that entrench their power.”
这legislation was drafted by William J. McGee, Senior Fellow for Aviation and Travel, and Lee Hepner, Legal Counsel for AELP. It follows the issuance ofa letter from the National Association of Attorneys General, in which 38 state attorneys general proposed that Congress allow them to enforce state and federal consumer protections for airline passengers.
您可能还记得,1992年,美国最高法院held that the Airline Deregulation Act preempted enforcement against the airlines of the NAAG fare advertising guidelines.Morales诉Trans World Airlines,Inc。,504 U.S. 374,378(1992)。随后,由于法院努力对“与航空公司的价格,路线或服务有关”的含义进行区分,但法院的其他案件也遵循了许多其他法院案件。
这language used by Congress was vague and left open to judicial determination a broad range of subjects that would, taken together, leave the airlines free of meaningful discipline by state laws designed to protect consumers. The net result was that the Department of Transportation was left as the sole arbiter of airline consumer protection. It’s fair to say, I believe, that prior to the pandemic and the conflict over refunds due travelers for airline-canceled flights, DOT’s consumer protection performance was uneven at best. In the pandemic-driven context, it was, and remains, abysmal. Billions of dollars in refunds, clearly owed are still outstanding as 2022 draws to a close.
NAAG提案将授权州AGS对航空公司执行其消费者保护法。它将将联邦执法的权力从DOT转移到司法部或联邦贸易委员会。AELP的提议更加全面。它授权私人“行动权”(直接起诉航空公司涉嫌错误的权利),禁止华尔街投资集团对多个航空公司的权益所有权,并允许州,法院,法院和立法机关规范和执行以保护消费者权利。拟议的法律得到了商务旅行联盟,消费者行动,美国消费者联合会的认可研究。
I am not aware of any other industry that enjoys what AELP accurately calls the “airlines’ liability shield.” Certainly, the travel advisor industry has no such protection. Indeed, as you have hopefully read in prior columns, advisors are frequently treated as fiduciaries in relation to their customers, a vastly greater standard than applies to the airlines.
这goal of the Airline Deregulation Act’s preemption provision was to prevent the states from inserting their own comprehensive regulatory systems in lieu of the federal one that Congress was abandoning. The result of the language chosen has been disastrous for consumer interests. DOT’s episodic and complex efforts to adopt pro-consumer regulations take years to achieve and often fall short of their asserted goals. As we saw with the undoing of the predecessor rulemaking to the pending proceeding on airline refunds, political interference can also stymy effective action. AELP is correct that structural change in the statutory scheme is essential to remedy the vacuum that exists in the protection of air travel consumers.
AELP的举动显然非常有影响力。因此,它几乎可以肯定会面临航空业的强烈反对。出于同样的原因,随着立法程序的展开,旅行顾问的支持将非常重要。这拟议立法的文本可以在这里阅读。