On May 14, 2026, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC that freight brokers can be held liable under state negligent-hiring laws when they select unsafe motor carriers. The 9-0 decision, written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, eliminates the federal preemption shield that brokers have relied on since 2023, and it changes how carrier selection, broker liability, and trucking insurance work across the entire freight industry. Every state in the country can now hear lawsuits against brokers who hired carriers with known safety problems.
This is one of the most consequential trucking-related Supreme Court decisions in decades. For carriers, it changes which brokers will tender them freight and how aggressively brokers will vet safety records before booking loads. For brokers, it transforms what used to be a paperwork compliance step into a documented legal defense that has to be maintained for every load. For insurers, it opens a brand-new line of liability exposure that has not yet been priced into broker coverage, and that pricing adjustment is coming.
This article walks through what the decision actually says, why the court reached this conclusion, what the practical effects look like for carriers and brokers, and how the trucking insurance market is already responding. The full opinion is short, only eight pages, but the implications run across every freight transaction in the country.
What the Court Actually Decided
The case arose from a 2017 crash on Illinois Interstate 70, in which Shawn Montgomery suffered injuries that resulted in the amputation of his leg. The carrier hauling the load, Caribe Transport II, had received a conditional safety rating from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration before C.H. Robinson booked the load. Montgomery sued C.H. Robinson under Illinois state law, alleging the broker negligently hired a carrier with documented safety deficiencies.
C.H. Robinson argued that Montgomery’s state-law negligent-hiring claim was preempted by the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act, or FAAAA, which broadly preempts state laws related to a broker’s prices, routes, or services. The Seventh Circuit had agreed with this argument in its 2023 Ye v. GlobalTranz decision, which became the freight industry’s principal preemption defense for the next three years. Other circuits had split on the issue, creating exactly the kind of disagreement the Supreme Court takes cases to resolve.
The court’s ruling is summarized in a single sentence from Justice Barrett’s opinion: “A claim that one company negligently hired another to transport goods is not preempted by the FAAAA because States retain authority to regulate safety ‘with respect to motor vehicles’ under the Act.” The full opinion is available through the Supreme Court’s official opinion archive.
The decision was unanimous, with all nine justices joining the result. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, filed a concurrence noting that the case was closer than the majority opinion suggested but agreeing that brokers cannot operate without any safety accountability when federal regulators impose almost none of their own.
The Statutory Framework Behind the Ruling
The FAAAA’s preemption clause, codified at 49 U.S.C. Section 14501(c)(1), states that no state may enact or enforce a law “related to a price, route, or service of any motor carrier . . . or any broker . . . with respect to the transportation of property.” This language has been read broadly since the law was enacted in 1994, and brokers have used it for decades to defeat state-law claims that interfered with their business operations.
The statute also contains a safety exception in Section 14501(c)(2)(A). This provision states that the preemption clause “shall not restrict the safety regulatory authority of a State with respect to motor vehicles.” The entire Montgomery case turned on whether a negligent-hiring claim against a broker qualifies as the exercise of state safety regulatory authority “with respect to motor vehicles.”
Justice Barrett’s analysis was straightforward. The FAAAA does not define “with respect to,” so the court used the ordinary meaning, which the court had already construed in Dan’s City Used Cars v. Pelkey (2013) to mean “concerns.” The FAAAA does define “motor vehicle” at Section 13102(16) as “a vehicle, machine, tractor, trailer, or semitrailer propelled or drawn by mechanical power and used on a highway in transportation.” Putting the pieces together, a claim is “with respect to motor vehicles” if it concerns the vehicles used in transportation. Requiring a broker to exercise ordinary care when selecting a carrier obviously concerns the trucks that will move the goods. That logic ended the preemption argument.
Why C.H. Robinson’s Counterarguments Failed
C.H. Robinson raised three main counterarguments, and the court rejected each one in turn. The first argument was that reading the safety exception this broadly would allow it to swallow the entire preemption clause, leaving brokers exposed to almost any state-law claim that could be reframed as a safety concern. Justice Barrett responded that the safety exception saves only claims involving motor vehicle safety. State laws unrelated to safety, including those involving prices, routes, and services that have nothing to do with safety, remain preempted. The preemption clause still does substantial work. It just does not protect brokers from accountability when their carrier selection puts dangerous trucks on the road.
The second argument was that Montgomery’s reading created statutory surplusage by making part of the safety exception redundant. The court found that the surplusage exists no matter how the disputed phrase is defined, because the overlap comes from the reference to a state’s regulatory authority, not from the breadth of “with respect to motor vehicles.” The argument did not change the outcome.
The third argument pointed to a separate subsection of the FAAAA that preempts state regulation of intrastate broker activities and contains no safety exception. C.H. Robinson argued Congress must have intended brokers to be fully shielded from safety claims, otherwise it would have included a safety exception in that subsection too. Justice Barrett acknowledged the inconsistency but wrote that the better approach was to live with the textual mystery than to rewrite the statute. The line is likely to be cited in every preemption brief in this area for the next decade.
Kavanaugh’s Concurrence Provides the Roadmap for What Comes Next
Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence, joined by Justice Alito, is the most candid judicial discussion of the policy stakes that appears anywhere in the decision. Kavanaugh acknowledged the strongest arguments on the broker industry’s side before explaining why those arguments did not change the outcome.
Kavanaugh noted two points in favor of brokers. First, the FAAAA mandates minimum insurance coverage for trucking companies but does not require it for brokers, which suggests Congress did not anticipate tort suits against brokers for carrier selection. Second, the subsection preempting intrastate broker activities without a safety exception produces the odd result that state tort suits are now permitted for interstate transportation but preempted for intrastate transportation, which Kavanaugh described as backward from what ordinary preemption doctrine would predict.
Then he explained why those points did not control. The FAAAA was an economic deregulation statute, not a safety deregulation statute. Congress left state tort suits against trucking companies fully intact, and it would be strange to read the same statute as creating complete immunity for brokers who select the carriers that cause the accidents. More importantly, there is no meaningful federal safety regulation of broker carrier selection practices. FMCSA requires brokers to select federally registered carriers but imposes essentially no safety standards on broker hiring decisions. Without state tort law, Kavanaugh wrote, brokers would operate in what amounts to a regulatory black hole.
Kavanaugh closed with a passage that is being quoted throughout the trucking industry. He noted that truck safety is a matter of life and death, with approximately 500,000 reported truck accidents producing about 5,000 deaths and 114,000 injuries in 2022. Some of those accidents involved carriers known to be unsafe and drivers known to be unfit. If brokers can be held liable for disregarding poor safety records, he wrote, they have a strong incentive to do business only with safe and reliable motor carriers. That is the policy result the court was willing to reach.
What the New Legal Standard Actually Requires
The legal standard the Supreme Court established is ordinary care. Brokers must exercise reasonable care in selecting motor carriers. Plaintiffs’ attorneys in every state can now ask juries to evaluate whether the broker met that standard at the time of dispatch, and the broker’s defense will turn on the documentation supporting the carrier selection decision.
Ordinary care in this context means specific things. Did the broker review the carrier’s safety record before booking the load? Was the carrier’s FMCSA data available, including its CSA scores and BASIC percentile rankings through the agency’s Safety Measurement System? Did the data show elevated crash rates, conditional safety ratings, out-of-service rates above industry averages, or prior enforcement actions? Did the broker have a documented process for evaluating carrier safety, or did the dispatcher simply pick the cheapest available truck?
Brokers acting in good faith with reputable carriers should still be able to defeat these lawsuits. The plaintiff’s own counsel told the justices at oral argument that brokers should be able to successfully defend against tort suits when they have acted reasonably and arranged transportation with reputable carriers. The court did not impose strict liability. It imposed a duty of reasonable care, which is a much more familiar legal standard.
The practical effect is that the broker’s carrier vetting process is now a litigation defense. The vetting process must be documented, repeatable, and defensible. A broker that can show it reviewed FMCSA data, applied written criteria, and declined to book carriers with serious safety deficiencies has the foundation for a defense that should succeed in most cases. A broker that booked a load with a conditional-rated carrier without checking has no defense at all.
What Carriers Need to Understand About the Ruling
For motor carriers, Montgomery v. Caribe changes the dynamics of working with brokers in several important ways. Brokers are going to vet more carefully and faster than they did before. Carriers that have spent years cleaning up safety records and maintaining low CSA scores will see those investments translate directly into freight access. Carriers operating with elevated BASIC scores, recent crashes, or conditional ratings will see brokers tier them lower or drop them entirely.
The factors that make a trucking company high risk to insure are now the same factors brokers will use to decide who they will and will not work with. Insurance underwriters and freight brokers are looking at the same FMCSA data and reaching similar conclusions about which carriers represent acceptable risk. A high-risk insurance profile translates directly into a high-risk broker relationship.
Carriers should pull their own FMCSA profile, review every entry, and use the DataQs system to challenge any inaccurate violation or crash assignment. Brokers will now treat publicly available data as the foundation of their selection decisions, and inaccurate data on a carrier’s profile produces real business consequences. Carriers should also expect brokers to ask more questions before tendering loads, including questions about specific recent inspections, recent driver hiring, and recent claims.
The longer-term effect for carriers is that the freight market will sort more aggressively by safety. Carriers with strong records will see preferred relationships expand. Carriers with weak records will see relationships contract. This was already happening under industry pressure, but the legal exposure created by Montgomery accelerates the timeline significantly.
What Brokers Need to Do Immediately
Every freight broker operating in the United States needs to assume that any negligent-hiring claim filed against them after May 14, 2026 will survive a preemption challenge. The federal shield is gone. Carrier selection decisions made before the ruling are still subject to scrutiny because the underlying tort theory has always existed. The preemption defense was procedural. Removing it makes the substantive negligent-hiring claim available everywhere.
The immediate priority is documenting the carrier selection process. Brokers who do not have a written vetting policy need to build one. Brokers with policies that only check active authority and a few basic facts need to expand them. At minimum, the documentation should include the FMCSA data reviewed at the time of selection, the criteria applied, the decision made, and the personnel involved. Timestamps matter because litigation may not arrive for two or three years after the underlying load.
Beyond documentation, brokers need to actually use the available data. The FMCSA Safety Measurement System is free and public. CSA scores, BASIC percentiles, out-of-service rates, inspection history, and crash data are all there. The SAFER system provides a quick reference for active authority, insurance status, and basic safety ratings. Brokers who choose not to review this data when it is freely available are choosing to litigate without a defense.
Long-term, brokers will need to think differently about which carriers they work with. Cost will still matter, but safety records will weigh more heavily in the decision than they did before May 14. The legal exposure of booking a load with a known-bad carrier is no longer hypothetical or capped at federal preemption.
The Insurance Implications Are Just Beginning
The insurance industry has not yet repriced broker coverage to reflect the post-Montgomery landscape, but the adjustment is coming. Most freight brokers carry contingent cargo insurance, general liability, and errors and omissions coverage. Very few carry the kind of excess liability coverage that would respond to a catastrophic negligent-hiring verdict in a jurisdiction where nuclear verdicts are common.
The rise in nuclear verdicts in trucking litigation has already produced eight-figure and nine-figure outcomes against motor carriers. The same jury dynamics now apply to brokers. A broker who books a load with a carrier that has a conditional safety rating, no defensible vetting process, and a subsequent fatal crash is exposed to verdicts that no existing coverage layer will fully absorb.
Underwriters are already adjusting how they evaluate broker accounts. The carriers a broker habitually selects, their safety profiles, their authority ages, their crash histories, and their inspection outcomes are all part of the risk profile that an underwriter now reviews. A broker that books primarily through preferred carrier networks with documented safety scoring will be treated differently than a broker that takes whoever bids the lowest on the load board.
Brokers should request a coverage review from their agent immediately. The question is not whether the current policy responds to negligent-hiring claims but whether the limits are adequate to the new exposure. A $1 million general liability policy made sense when preemption ended the case on a motion to dismiss. It does not make sense when discovery and a jury trial are both on the table. Excess liability layers, contingent auto coverage, and broker-specific errors and omissions policies are all going to see significant pricing changes over the next 12 to 24 months.
The Decision Extends Beyond Traditional Brokers
Kavanaugh’s concurrence flagged a point that deserves attention. The opinion is written about freight brokers because C.H. Robinson is a broker, but the logic applies to anyone in the supply chain who selects a carrier and has access to publicly available safety data. Third-party logistics providers, freight forwarders, and digital freight platforms that algorithmically match loads to carriers are all subject to the same legal standard.
Shippers who select carriers directly have always been exposed to negligent-hiring liability, since the preemption defense was specific to brokers. The Montgomery decision does not change shipper liability directly, but it does change the broader litigation landscape. Shippers who assumed their broker’s preemption defense would insulate the entire transaction need to rethink that assumption. The broker can now be sued. The broker’s defense will include evidence of what the shipper required, what the shipper knew, and the shipper’s own carrier-selection criteria.
The liability does not disappear. It redistributes across the supply chain to whoever had the data and could have made a different decision. Carriers selecting drivers, shippers selecting brokers, and brokers selecting carriers all face the same fundamental obligation. Reasonable care in the selection decision. The Supreme Court made that obligation enforceable for brokers in every state. The principle reaches further than the named defendant.
Why This Matters for the Industry Long Term
Montgomery v. Caribe is going to accelerate a sorting process that was already underway in the trucking industry. Safe carriers, well-vetted broker relationships, and documented compliance practices are going to be rewarded. Unsafe carriers, sloppy broker operations, and undocumented decisions are going to be penalized. The market mechanisms that drive this sorting just gained a legal enforcement layer.
For carriers, this is mostly good news. Safety investments now produce direct freight-access benefits, not just lower insurance premiums. Brokers will compete to book reliable carriers because the alternative carries real legal risk. The freight market will likely become more relationship-based and less spot-market driven for any load with meaningful liability exposure.
For brokers, the ruling forces operational discipline that the industry has resisted for years. Carrier vetting will become a formal function with dedicated resources, documented processes, and audit trails. The smallest brokers may struggle to build this infrastructure, but the largest brokers will have it operational within months. Mid-sized brokers will face the hardest adjustment because the costs of building the function are significant relative to their revenue.
For the insurance market, the next 24 months are going to produce significant repricing as actual claim data starts flowing. The first wave of post-Montgomery negligent-hiring suits are already being filed. The discovery and trial cycles will produce verdicts within two years, and those verdicts will shape how underwriters price the coverage going forward. Brokers who can document strong vetting processes will see better terms than brokers who cannot.
What Trucking Professionals Should Do This Week
Carriers should pull their FMCSA profiles and review every entry. Challenge any inaccurate violations through DataQs. Document the corrective actions you have taken since any past compliance issues. The data brokers are using to evaluate you is the same data plaintiffs’ attorneys will use to evaluate them, and your profile is now your business calling card.
Brokers should formalize their carrier vetting process this week. If you do not have one, build it. If you have one, audit it against the Montgomery decision. The vetting must include FMCSA safety data review, documented criteria for accepting or rejecting carriers, and dated records of the decision for every load. Talk to your insurance agent about whether your current coverage responds to the post-Montgomery exposure.
Shippers should review broker contracts and vetting expectations. Many shippers have allowed brokers to handle carrier selection without documented oversight. That arrangement made sense when brokers were preempted from liability. It makes less sense now that brokers can be held accountable, and shippers may face indirect exposure through their broker relationships if those brokers cannot defend their selection decisions.
Everyone in the supply chain should expect the next 12 months to bring increased documentation requirements, more aggressive carrier safety vetting, and a more competitive market for carriers with strong safety records. The decision rewards responsible operators and penalizes the carriers and brokers who have cut corners. That is the policy result the Supreme Court was willing to reach. The market is now going to enforce it.
Where the Industry Goes From Here
Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II is a short opinion with significant downstream consequences. The federal preemption shield that protected freight brokers from negligent-hiring claims for nearly three decades is gone. State tort law applies in every jurisdiction. The legal standard is ordinary care, and the defense depends on documented vetting practices that very few brokers have currently operationalized.
For carriers, the decision rewards safety investments and accelerates the divide between operators with strong records and operators without them. For brokers, it forces a documented compliance function that the industry has avoided for years. For insurers, it creates a new and largely unpriced exposure that will reshape broker coverage over the next two years. For everyone else in the freight industry, it confirms a principle that should have been obvious all along. If you pick the carrier, you own the choice.
The carriers, brokers, and shippers who treat this as a turning point rather than a regulatory inconvenience will come out of the next 24 months in stronger competitive positions. The ones who do not will discover that the Supreme Court has just made a lot of decisions that used to be invisible into very visible questions for juries to answer.
Frequently Asked Questions
What did the Supreme Court rule in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport?
The court ruled unanimously on May 14, 2026 that state negligent-hiring claims against freight brokers are not preempted by the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act. Brokers can now be sued under state law for negligently selecting unsafe motor carriers in every state. The legal standard is ordinary care.
Does this ruling affect motor carriers as well as brokers?
The ruling directly addresses broker liability, but the practical effect on carriers is significant. Brokers will vet carrier safety records more aggressively, which means carriers with strong FMCSA profiles will see expanded freight access and carriers with weaker records will see relationships contract. The factors brokers use to evaluate carriers are now the same factors insurance underwriters use.
What does ordinary care mean for brokers selecting carriers?
Ordinary care means reviewing publicly available safety data before booking a load, including FMCSA CSA scores, BASIC percentile rankings, out-of-service rates, and inspection history. Brokers should have a documented selection process, written criteria for accepting or rejecting carriers, and dated records of the decision for every load.
How does the ruling affect freight broker insurance?
Broker insurance has not yet been repriced to reflect post-Montgomery exposure, but adjustments are coming. Most existing broker policies were sized to a preemption-protected environment. Limits, excess layers, and coverage forms will all see significant changes over the next 12 to 24 months as actual claim data emerges.
Does the ruling apply to digital freight platforms and third-party logistics providers?
Yes. The legal logic of the decision applies to anyone in the supply chain who selects a carrier and has access to publicly available safety data. The opinion is written about brokers because C.H. Robinson is a broker, but third-party logistics providers, freight forwarders, and digital freight matching platforms all fall under the same standard of ordinary care in carrier selection.