Montgomery Supreme Court Decision: No Automatic Liability... But Carrier Selection Is Now a Transportation Safety & Governance Priority
- Paolo Scrofani
- Jun 2
- 2 min read
The Supreme Court’s decision in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC did not create automatic liability for brokers, shippers, or transportation stakeholders. Plaintiffs must still prove the traditional elements of negligence, including duty, breach, causation, foreseeability, and failure to exercise reasonable care. What the Court did clarify, however, is that the FAAAA does not broadly preempt state-law negligence claims tied to motor vehicle safety where the statutory “safety exception” applies. That distinction is legally significant because it weakens a defense framework that portions of the transportation industry had relied upon for years.
Importantly, Montgomery did not emerge in isolation. In Schramm v. Foster, 341 F. Supp. 2d 536 (D. Md. 2004), the court recognized that a freight broker could owe a duty of reasonable care in selecting a motor carrier, establishing one of the earliest modern negligent-selection precedents in transportation litigation. Years later, Miller v. C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc., 976 F.3d 1016 (9th Cir. 2020), further reinforced that negligent-selection claims involving transportation safety could survive FAAAA preemption under the statute’s safety exception. Montgomery substantially strengthens the legal durability of that reasoning at the national level.
Collectively, these decisions reflect a broader judicial trend: courts are increasingly examining not only who physically transported freight, but also how transportation providers were selected, retained, supervised, and operationally governed. Modern transportation systems are operationally interconnected. Brokers, shippers, procurement teams, transportation managers, routing expectations, delivery schedules, and carrier-selection processes all contribute to transportation risk exposure. As a result, carrier selection is no longer viewed solely as a procurement activity; it is increasingly treated as a transportation-safety and risk-governance function.
For that reason, organizations involved in transportation should view Montgomery not as a panic event, but as a governance event. The stronger response is not fear, but operational maturity: defensible carrier qualification standards, broker oversight, insurance validation, routing governance, safety-monitoring protocols, escalation procedures, and documented transportation-risk ownership. The issue is not automatic liability. The issue is whether reasonable care was exercised throughout the transportation-selection process when public safety was foreseeably implicated.
Montgomery didn’t create automatic liability, it simply made carrier selection a true transportation safety and governance responsibility.