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Member, Beacon International Group, Ltd.
A federal appeals court has blocked the implementation of a San Francisco law requiring cellphone dealers to warn customers that cellphone use might expose them to cancer-causing radiation.
The City and County of San Francisco’s cellphone ordinance was to take effect in October 2011, but enforcement has been delayed pending industry legal challenges. The ruling in CTIA-The Wireless Association v. City and County of San Francisco, Calif., on Monday by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco blocked enforcement of the ordinance while those challenges continue.
The cellphone ordinance would require cellphone dealers to give phone buyers a fact sheet informing them that the World Health Organization had classified radio frequency emissions from the phones as a possible carcinogen. It also would require retailers to display posters and place stickers on display ads presenting similar information.
Last year, a federal district court judge in San Francisco ruled that the poster and sticker requirement was unconstitutional but later held that cellphone dealers could be required to distribute a modified version of the fact sheet San Francisco required.
Both the industry and San Francisco appealed that ruling.
The appeals court panel ruled 3-0 on Monday in an unpublished opinion that even the modified version of the fact sheet could not be held to meet the required test that governmentally compelled disclosures to consumers be “purely factual and uncontroversial” and upheld the district court judge’s original injunction against enforcing the ordinance altogether.