A review of Montgomery v Caribe Transport II, LLC et al

B Alexander Moghaddam
Law Offices of Alexander Moghaddam PC, Los Angeles, US
alex@moghaddamlaw.com  

On 14 May 2026, in a relatively brief opinion, the US Supreme Court issued a major decision for the logistics industry in the United States. In Montgomery v Caribe Transport II,[1] the Court resolved a split in the federal Circuit courts on the question of whether the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act (FAAAA), 49 USC section 14501(c)(1), preempted state negligent-hiring claims against property brokers. The Montgomery case involved a negligence claim by a motorist, Shawn Montgomery, who sustained serious personal injuries when a truck, transporting an interstate shipment of plastic pots through the state of Illinois, struck his motor vehicle while it was stopped on the side of the road.[2] Montgomery sued the driver of the truck, Yosniel Varela-Mojena; Caribe Transport, the motor carrier that employed Varela-Mojena; and CH Robinson, the property broker that arranged for Caribe Transport to haul the shipment.[3]3Montgomery alleged, among other things, that Caribe Transport had a ‘conditional’ safety rating from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), and that the FMCSA had determined that Caribe Transport had been ‘deficient “with respect to qualification of drivers”, “hours of service of drivers”, “inspection, repair and maintenance,” … and more’.[4] Based on these allegations, Montgomery asserted, in pertinent part, a claim for negligent hiring against CH Robinson.[5]

On 11 January 2024, the US District Court for the Southern District of Illinois granted judgment on the pleadings in favour of CH Robinson.[6] Relying on the precedent established by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, the District Court held that the FAAAA preempted Montgomery’s negligent-hiring claim against CH Robinson, and the Seventh Circuit affirmed the District Court’s decision on appeal.[7] The Supreme Court granted certiorari and, in a unanimous decision, reversed the Seventh Circuit’s decision, resolving the split among the federal courts in the process.

The Court began its analysis by reviewing the relevant history and preemption language of the FAAAA. The Court recounted that, in 1994, in order to relieve motor carriers from state regulations that inhibited competition in the trucking industry, Congress enacted the FAAAA.[8] The FAAAA expressly preempted certain state regulations as applied to motor carriers.[9] In 1995, Congress amended the FAAAA to extend the preemption to property brokers. The preemption provision, in relevant part, bars states from ‘enact[ing] or enforce[ing] a law, regulation, or other provision having the force and effect of law related to a price, route, or service’ of motor carriers and brokers ‘with respect to the transportation of property’.[10]

The Court then examined the so-called ‘safety exception’ of the statute, which mandates that the preemption provision ‘shall not restrict the safety regulatory authority of a State with respect to motor vehicles’[11] (emphasis added), and explained that Congress’ purpose in enacting the safety exception was ‘to ensure that its preemption of States’ economic authority over motor carriers of property [did] “not restrict” the preexisting and traditional state police power over safety’.[12]

The narrow question before the Court was whether negligent-hiring claims against brokers, of the type brought by Montgomery, ‘are claims “with respect to motor vehicles”’.[13] The Court considered the various dictionary definitions of the phrase ‘with respect to’ and settled on ‘concerns’ and ‘regards’.[14] For the meaning of ‘motor vehicle’, it turned to the FAAAA’s definition of the term: ‘a vehicle, machine, tractor, trailer, or semitrailer propelled or drawn by mechanical power and used on a highway in transportation’.[15] The Court connected the definitional dots and concluded that ‘a claim is “with respect to motor vehicles” if it “concerns” or “regards” the vehicles used in transportation’.[16] Having arrived at this ‘interpretation’ of the safety exception, the Court had little trouble finding that the plaintiff’s allegations that CH Robinson had failed to exercise reasonable care when it hired Caribe Transport, a carrier with ‘a subpar safety rating’, to ‘transport goods via truck’ concerned motor vehicles. Montgomery’s claim, therefore, fell within the FAAAA’s safety exception and was thus saved.[17]

Writing for the Court, Justice Barrett alluded to the scope and scale of the Montgomery decision by noting that ‘[t]oday, roughly 28,000 brokers arrange transportation for about a third of all freight shipped in the United States by more than 780,000 carriers’.[18] In the nearly two months since Montgomery, US freight brokers, needless to say, have been focused more than ever on their carrier vetting procedures, potential liability exposure, insurance coverage and costs, and contractual relationships with shippers and motor carriers. As a significance of the high Court’s decision for the industry, in June 2026, the Transportation Intermediaries Association petitioned the FMCSA to issue uniform carrier-vetting rules and to identify high-risk carriers.

As brokers and their legal counsel navigate around Montgomery and the inevitable case law to follow, at least two observations about the Supreme Court’s decision should be borne in mind for now. First, the Court’s decision is limited to the specific question of whether the FAAAA preempts state negligent-hiring claims against brokers. The Court’s ruling merely allows any such cognisable state law claim to proceed unimpeded by the FAAAA. This is a potentially important point, as laws can vary significantly from state to state. For example, in a very recent case, a California Court of Appeal applied California law in affirming a summary judgment ruling by the trial court on a negligent-hiring claim against a broker for personal injuries.[19]

In Hu, the California court noted the ‘strong presumption’ against negligent-hiring claims brought by the employees of independent contractors seeking redress for personal injuries and applied that settled state-law principle to the negligent-hiring claim before it.[20]. Indeed, there appears to be a dearth of California-state case law on the cognisability of broker negligence claims even more broadly.

Second, the Montgomery decision begs the question whether any negligent-hiring claims against brokers are still preempted by the FAAAA. The Court itself broadly observed that ‘[t]he safety exception saves only a subset of preempted claims: those involving regulations concerning motor vehicle safety’.[21] In his concurring opinion, Justice Kavanaugh echoed this point by reminding us that ‘the negligent-hiring tort against brokers, like the negligence tort against trucking companies, exists to keep unsafe trucks and unsafe drivers off America’s highways’.[22]

In this context, the prior split in the Circuit Courts may be instructive. In deciding which direction to take between the prior lines of conflicting Circuit decisions, the Supreme Court effectively agreed with the 2020 decision of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Miller v. CH Robinson Worldwide, Inc, 976 F3d 1016, 1020 (9th Cir 2020). Like the Miller decision, the Court in Montgomery analysed the ‘with respect to motor vehicles’ phrase in the safety exception of the FAAAA and applied the exception to the negligent-hiring personal injury claim before it. What makes the juxtaposition of the Ninth Circuit’s earlier Miller decision and the Supreme Court’s recent Montgomery opinion interesting for purposes of this discussion is what came between them. In two recent decisions, one in 2023 and one in 2025, the US District Court for the Central District of California, one of the four California federal district courts within the Ninth Circuit, concluded that negligent-hiring claims against property brokers arising out of the theft of cargo were preempted by the FAAAA, notwithstanding the Ninth Circuit’s Miller decision. In both instances, the district court concluded that the safety exception’s phrase ‘with respect to motor vehicles’ did not cover the thefts at issue, as they did not concern ‘motor vehicles’, and thus the claims were preempted by the FAAAA.23 Time will tell whether the reasoning of these decisions survives the Montgomery ruling, but they nonetheless illustrate the potential limitations on the scope of the Supreme Court’s decision.