Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II: What Freight Brokers Need to Know

On May 14, 2026, the United States Supreme Court held unanimously in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC that a state-law negligent hiring claim against a freight broker is not preempted by the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act, because it falls within the statute’s safety exception.

For brokers this is the most consequential decision in a decade. The preemption defense that had been getting negligent-selection cases dismissed at the pleadings stage in several circuits is gone. Those cases now proceed to the merits, and the merits question is whether your carrier selection was reasonable. That question is answered by your file.

What the case was about

Shawn Montgomery was severely injured when he was struck by a driver operating for Caribe Transport II. Montgomery sued the freight broker that had placed the load with Caribe, C.H. Robinson, on a theory of negligent carrier selection.

The allegation was specific, and it is worth reading closely because it describes information that was publicly available before the load moved: Montgomery alleged that Caribe held only a conditional safety rating from FMCSA, with documented deficiencies in driver qualification, hours of service, vehicle maintenance, and crash rates, and that C.H. Robinson knew or should have known that selecting the carrier was reasonably likely to cause a crash.

That is the shape of every negligent-selection claim. Not “you failed to predict an accident,” but “the warning signs were on the carrier’s public record and you placed the load anyway.”

The legal question

Two provisions of the FAAAA were in tension.

The preemption clause, 49 USC 14501(c)(1), bars states from enforcing laws “related to a price, route, or service” of a motor carrier or broker. Its purpose was deregulatory: to stop states from re-regulating trucking economics through the back door.

The safety exception, 49 USC 14501(c)(2)(A), preserves “the safety regulatory authority of a State with respect to motor vehicles.”

Nearly every circuit agreed that a negligent-selection claim “relates to” broker services, and so falls inside the preemption clause. The disagreement was entirely about the exception: is a common-law tort claim about which carrier a broker chose an exercise of a state’s safety regulatory authority “with respect to motor vehicles”?

The circuit split that made this inevitable

The lower courts had divided sharply:

• The Seventh Circuit held such claims preempted in Ye v. GlobalTranz Enterprises, Inc., 74 F.4th 453 (7th Cir. 2023), and applied the same reasoning to Montgomery’s claim, 124 F.4th 1053. The Eleventh Circuit took the same narrow view of the exception.
• The Ninth Circuit had gone the other way, reading the safety exception broadly enough to preserve negligent-selection claims.

The practical effect was that identical facts produced opposite outcomes depending on where the plaintiff filed. A broker’s exposure was a function of geography rather than conduct.

What the Court held

Justice Barrett, writing for a unanimous Court, held that negligent hiring claims concern motor vehicle safety and therefore survive within the safety exception. Justice Kavanaugh filed a concurrence, joined by Justice Alito.

The Court rejected the argument that the exception should be read narrowly to cover only direct state regulation of vehicles. It also drew a boundary worth noting: state laws related to motor carrier prices, routes, and services that have no relationship to safety remain preempted. The decision is not a general invitation to regulate broker economics through tort law. It is a holding that safety-based selection claims are the kind of claim Congress left to the states.

The judgment of the Seventh Circuit was reversed and the case remanded.

What actually changed for brokers

Preemption is no longer a threshold exit. Before this ruling, a broker sued in the Seventh or Eleventh Circuit had a strong argument for dismissal before discovery, regardless of how the carrier had been vetted. That argument is unavailable now.

The merits are the fight. The question in these cases is whether the broker exercised reasonable care in selecting the carrier. That is fact-intensive, survives summary judgment easily when the facts are disputed, and puts your vetting practices in front of a jury.

Discovery now reaches your process. Expect document requests aimed at what you checked, when you checked it, what your written selection standards are, whether you followed them on this load, and whether you have ever booked carriers you flagged. Plaintiff’s counsel will pull the carrier’s FMCSA history and compare it against what you recorded.

Your insurers and your customers will ask. Contingent cargo and broker liability underwriting is already tightening around documented vetting procedures, and sophisticated shippers are adding vetting representations to their broker agreements.

What did not change

A few things worth keeping in proportion:

• This is not strict liability. Brokers are not automatically liable for crashes involving carriers they booked. The plaintiff still has to prove negligence in the selection and causation.
• A conditional safety rating is not a per se bar. Carriers operate legally with conditional ratings every day. What Montgomery alleged was a conditional rating plus specific documented deficiencies plus a broker that placed the load anyway. The claim is about the totality, not one field.
• The ruling does not tell you what reasonable care is. There is no federal vetting standard. Reasonableness will be developed case by case, which means industry practice and your own written standards become the benchmark you are measured against.

What a defensible file looks like now

The exposure is no longer theoretical, so the documentation has to be real. What protects a broker is a contemporaneous, dated record of what the carrier’s public safety and authority profile looked like at the moment the load was tendered.

At minimum, per load:

1. Authority and registration status at the time of booking, with a timestamp. See MC number vs DOT number for why both fields matter.
2. Out-of-service status, checked immediately before tender rather than at onboarding.
3. Safety rating and its date. If the carrier is rated conditional, the file should show that you saw it and record why you proceeded. A documented decision is defensible. The same decision undocumented looks like you never looked.
4. Insurance, verified with the insurer rather than from a forwarded PDF, with limits and effective dates.
5. Cross-entity linkage, because a carrier connected to previously sanctioned entities is exactly the fact a plaintiff’s expert will surface. Run it free with the double brokering risk check.
6. Your written selection standard, and evidence that this load was evaluated against it.

The full sequence is in how to verify a carrier before you book.

The evidentiary problem nobody plans for

Here is the practical trap. FMCSA data is a live database, not an archive. By the time a claim is filed, which may be a year or more after the load moved:

• The carrier’s authority status may have changed, possibly several times.
• A linked entity that shared the carrier’s phone and address may have been dissolved and dropped from the census.
• The safety rating may have been upgraded, or the carrier may have been re-registered under a new DOT number entirely.

You cannot reconstruct what the record showed on the day you booked by looking it up later. Either you captured it then, or the evidence is gone and you are left testifying about your habits. A jury weighing “our process is to always check” against a plaintiff’s expert holding the carrier’s contemporaneous FMCSA printout is not a position you want to be in.

This is the entire argument for freezing a timestamped record per load rather than relying on screenshots in a TMS note field or an email thread. The record has to exist before anyone knows it will be needed.

What to do in the next quarter

If you are a broker reading this after the ruling:

• Write down your selection standard if it only exists in people’s heads. An imperfect written standard you follow consistently is worth more in litigation than an excellent unwritten one.
• Decide your conditional-rating policy explicitly, and apply it consistently. Inconsistency is what plaintiff’s counsel uses to show the standard was not real.
• Start capturing records now, because the value of the archive is entirely a function of how far back it goes. The file you wish you had in 2028 is the one you start keeping today.
• Re-read your carrier agreements for the re-brokering prohibition and your shipper agreements for vetting representations you may now be making.

The ruling did not create a new duty out of nothing. Negligent selection has always been a theory. What changed is that brokers in half the country can no longer get out of the case before anyone looks at how they actually chose the carrier.