US companies on Wednesday won important new protections from lawsuits when the Supreme Court imposed new limits on suits brought by patients harmed by medical devices.

Voting 8-1 in Riegel v Medtronic, the justices barred a suit from the widow of a man injured by a heart catheter that had been approved for sale by the Food and Drug Administration. The issue was whether injured patients can second-guess the FDA by suing in a state court for products that have federal approval.

The ruling was one of three on Wednesday in which the justices affirmed the supremacy of federal laws or regulations over often tougher state laws aimed at protecting consumers. The US Chamber of Commerce welcomed the ruling.

“This is a great day for commonsense rulings from the court, which showed its appreciation for the problem of the Balkanisation of the economy by state laws and the difficulties of having to comply with inconsistent state laws in a national economy,” said Robin Conrad of the National Chamber Litigation Center, the legal arm of the US Chamber.

Business suffered a defeat in another case on Wednesday, in which the justices ruled that workers who invest in 401(k) and other retirement plans can file suits claiming their individual accounts were mishandled.

The ruling could lead to many more lawsuits against employers over the administration of their retirement plans. Jeff Russell, a retirement law expert at law firm Bryan Cave, said that before the ruling, “businesses were protected from claims unless an error impacted the entire [retirement] plan. But now an error affecting even a single participant will be grounds for litigation”.

But Ms Conrad of the US Chamber said the ruling was narrower than expected: “It is one that we can live with, it could have been much more difficult for the business community.”

The ruling in the catheter case will help medical device makers in thousands of lawsuits involving other heart devices and could also be good news for drugmakers, who are fighting two similar cases. Justice Antonin Scalia acknowledged that some medical devices approved by the FDA were risky and might injure patients, but the job of the agency was to weigh the risks against the need to make devices available to save lives.
Additional reporting by Christopher Bowe in New York