After Montgomery v. Caribe, a broker's carrier-selection record is evidence. Here is what the decision says — and what a defensible record looks like.

What the Supreme Court decided

On May 14, 2026, in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC (No. 24-1238), a unanimous Supreme Court held that a federal statute freight brokers had long relied on — the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act of 1994 (FAAAA) — does not shield brokers from state-law claims that they negligently selected an unsafe motor carrier.

The background

The FAAAA bars states from enforcing laws "related to a price, route, or service" of a motor carrier or broker. For years, brokers argued that a negligence suit over which carrier they hired was such a law, and that it was therefore preempted. Courts split. The FAAAA also contains a "safety exception," preserving states' "safety regulatory authority … with respect to motor vehicles," and the question was whether an ordinary state negligence claim about carrier selection falls inside that exception.

The holding

The Court held that it does. A state common-law negligent-selection claim is an exercise of the state's safety regulatory authority with respect to motor vehicles, so it survives preemption. Brokers can be sued in state court, under state negligence law, for hiring a carrier they should not have hired — and the case then turns on the facts: what the broker knew, what it could have known, and what it did with that information.

The nuance

The decision is about safety-based negligence. Several firms have noted that the reasoning does not reach every claim a shipper might bring: claims about cargo theft, double-brokering fraud or other purely economic losses do not fit the "safety … with respect to motor vehicles" exception in the same way, and remain subject to preemption arguments. Husch Blackwell's alert makes exactly this point. The practical line for a compliance program: the exposure the decision opens is about crashes and injuries, and the record that matters is the safety record.

What it does not do

• It does not create a federal standard of care, a checklist, or a safe harbor. What counts as reasonable selection is a state-law question decided case by case.
• It does not say that any particular data source, score or vendor is required or sufficient.
• It does not make brokers strictly liable for carriers' crashes. The claim is negligence: a plaintiff has to show the broker failed to act reasonably in light of what was knowable.

Opinion: supremecourt.gov, No. 24-1238 (May 14, 2026).

Further reading (transportation-law alerts)

• Benesch — "One Battle After Another: Freight Brokers in a Post-Montgomery World"
• Husch Blackwell — "Cargo Theft Claims Against Brokers Remain Preempted After Montgomery" (the safety-vs-economic-loss distinction)
• Baker Donelson — "Negligent Selection After Montgomery v. Caribe: What Every Logistics Broker Needs to Know"
• Crowell & Moring — "Bad Match, Big Consequences"
• Hinshaw & Culbertson — "SCOTUS Clears Road to Negligent Hiring/Selection Against Freight Brokers"

What a defensible carrier-selection record looks like

Every alert says the same thing: document your vetting. In a negligence case the question is not whether the carrier turned out to be unsafe — it is what the broker knew or reasonably could have known on the day it made the selection, and whether it acted reasonably on that. A useful record therefore has four properties.

Concretely, for each carrier and each selection you should be able to produce: the DOT number and legal name as verified; operating status and authority; insurance filing status; whether an out-of-service order was in force; the carrier's inspection and crash history relative to peers, with the indicators and their inputs; any red flags (for example a link to a prior, revoked identity); the date and time of the check; and the decision taken. CarrierScore's evidence report is one way to produce this record from archived public data; it is not the only way, and it does not replace your policy or your judgment.

Free check: one carrier, public FMCSA data

Enter a USDOT number. This runs a keyless, rate-limited call to the CarrierScore API and shows the carrier's two risk indices, their components, and any hard flags, computed from daily-archived FMCSA data. No account needed.

How the indices are built and how they were validated on held-out cohorts — including the numbers and the caveats — is published at carrierscore.io/methodology. Data: public FMCSA / U.S. DOT datasets. Not a safety fitness determination; not endorsed by FMCSA.