The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Thursday, May 14, 2026, that freight brokers can be sued under state negligence law for hiring unsafe motor carriers — a decision that strips the trucking industry’s largest middlemen of the federal preemption shield they have used for decades to avoid responsibility when the carriers they dispatch cause catastrophic highway crashes. The 9-0 opinion in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC was authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, with a concurrence by Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined by Justice Samuel Alito.

The plaintiff, Shawn Montgomery, lost his leg when a Mack truck operated by Caribe Transport veered off course on an Illinois highway in 2017. Montgomery’s lawsuit named C.H. Robinson — the nation’s largest freight broker — alleging that the broker should have known the carrier it dispatched had a “conditional” safety rating and a documented history of driver-qualification deficiencies, and that hiring such a carrier breached an ordinary duty of care owed to the other people who would be on the road with that truck. For the first time, the Supreme Court has made clear that the answer to that question belongs to a jury, not to a federal preemption clause.

This guide breaks down what the Montgomery v. Caribe decision actually says, why nine justices agreed unanimously despite vigorous opposition from the freight industry and the Trump administration, what it means for highway safety and the families of crash victims across America, and why the ruling is expected to reward responsible carriers who already follow the rules while exposing the brokers and bad actors who have profited from cutting corners on safety.

What the Supreme Court Decided in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport

The Legal Reasoning — In Plain English

The FAAAA, passed in 1994, preempts state laws that target the “price, route, or service” of motor carriers and brokers. The statute has a specific carve-out, however: states retain their “safety regulatory authority” over motor vehicles. The entire case turned on whether a negligent-hiring claim against a broker counts as a safety claim “with respect to motor vehicles.” Justice Barrett’s answer, delivered in a remarkably concise opinion, was yes. The trucks a broker dispatches are motor vehicles, and requiring the broker to exercise reasonable care in choosing which carriers put those trucks on the road plainly concerns the safety of those vehicles. The court relied on its 2013 decision in Dan’s City Used Cars v. Pelkey, which had previously interpreted the phrase “with respect to” to mean “concerns.”

The court rejected the freight industry’s three principal counter-arguments. C.H. Robinson and its supporters argued that this reading would swallow the preemption clause whole; Barrett responded that only safety-related state claims are preserved, leaving many price, route, and service claims still preempted. They argued that the reading creates statutory surplusage; Barrett said the overlap exists regardless of how the phrase is read. And they pointed to a parallel preemption clause covering intrastate broker activity that lacks any safety exception, asking how Congress could possibly have intended the asymmetric result. Barrett’s reply, in a line likely to be quoted in trucking and preemption briefs for the next decade: “Better to live with the mystery than to rewrite the statute.”

Why This Ruling Will Make America’s Highways Safer

Until Thursday, freight brokers operating across state lines could often persuade a court that any claim alleging they had negligently dispatched an unsafe carrier was preempted by federal law and had to be dismissed before a jury ever heard it. That defense — first cemented by the Seventh Circuit in Ye v. GlobalTranz in 2023 — created what Justice Kavanaugh, in his concurrence, called a “black hole” of accountability. The federal government had imposed no meaningful safety regulation on broker hiring practices, and state tort law had been blocked from filling the gap. Brokers could legally book the cheapest available truck without checking its safety record, and if that truck killed someone, the broker’s exposure would often disappear in a motion to dismiss.

That is no longer the rule. The ordinary legal duty that every other industry already operates under — to exercise reasonable care in selecting a contractor whose work carries a risk of physical harm to others — now applies to freight brokers in every state. The relevant safety data has been public and free for years. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s SAFER system publishes every carrier’s authority status, safety rating, inspection history, crash record, and out-of-service percentages. Brokers who consult that data and reject carriers showing elevated risk will be in a strong defensive posture. Brokers who book whichever truck is cheapest, ignore the safety data sitting in plain view, and dispatch a carrier with a known bad record will now have to explain that choice to a jury.

Accountability for Brokers Who Hire Terrible Truckers

This is the practical heart of Montgomery v. Caribe. Roughly 780,000 motor carriers operate in the United States, and they range from disciplined fleets with rigorous driver-qualification programs and modern equipment to thinly capitalized operators with conditional safety ratings, high BASIC percentile scores, repeat out-of-service violations, and brand-new authority obtained after a previous company was shut down for cause. Brokers know the difference. The carrier safety data is available to them on demand. Until Thursday, choosing the worst carrier in the queue carried essentially no legal risk for the broker as long as the carrier still had a federal registration. After Thursday, that choice creates real, discoverable, jury-decidable liability.

Plaintiff’s attorneys representing crash victims and their families have been building case files for years against brokers who repeatedly dispatched carriers with documented red flags, waiting for the preemption defense to fall. Those files will start moving immediately. The discovery requests will ask the broker which safety data it reviewed, which carriers it habitually selected, what its written vetting process was (if any), and what the safety record of its preferred carriers looked like on the day of the dispatch that ended in a crash. If the broker has no written process, that absence is itself evidence. If the broker has a process that consists of confirming the carrier has active authority and a pulse, it will not survive cross-examination.

What This Means for Crash Victims, Brokers, and the Public

If you or a family member has been seriously injured or killed in a crash involving a commercial motor vehicle, Montgomery v. Caribe materially expands the universe of parties who may be legally responsible. The motor carrier and the driver have always been potential defendants. Now the broker — the company that dispatched the carrier and, by federal statute, has access to the data showing whether that carrier presented an elevated risk — can also be named. In many cases, the broker has substantially deeper pockets than the carrier, especially when the carrier was undercapitalized or operating on the minimum federally required insurance. The recoveries available to victims and their families can therefore be meaningfully larger after this ruling than they were before.

For responsible brokers — the ones who already check FMCSA data, maintain written carrier-vetting procedures, refuse loads to high-risk carriers, and document their decisions — Montgomery v. Caribe is not an emergency. It is a confirmation that the standard they have been holding themselves to is now the standard the law expects of every broker. For brokers who have been booking the cheapest truck without inquiry, Montgomery v. Caribe is a wake-up call that requires immediate change: build a vetting process, document it, train your team on it, and update your insurance coverage to reflect the new exposure.

For the public, the most important effect of Montgomery v. Caribe will be the one that does not generate headlines — the crashes that do not happen because a broker checked the data, saw the red flags, and chose a different carrier. Every dangerous truck that a broker declines to dispatch is a crash that may have killed or maimed someone. That is the safety benefit of accountability. It is also, in the long run, the economic benefit, because the cost of nuclear verdicts, lost lives, and devastated families is far greater than the cost of running a carrier through SAFER before booking the load.

Our Texas truck accident attorneys are ready to investigate the full chain of dispatch in every serious commercial motor vehicle crash. It is also critical to preserve evidence early: carrier safety records can be lost, internal broker communications can be deleted, and the SAFER snapshot of a carrier at the moment of dispatch needs to be captured before the data refreshes.