SCOTUS killed the broker defense; is truck leasing next?

On May 14, 2026, the Supreme Court decided Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, and the freight brokerage industry lost the defense it had been living behind for a decade. The vote was 9 to 0. Justice Barrett wrote the opinion.

A state-law claim that a broker negligently hired an unsafe motor carrier is not preempted by federal law because requiring a broker to exercise ordinary care in choosing which trucking company hauls a load concerns the safety of motor vehicles, and motor vehicle safety is exactly what Congress left to the states.

Shawn Montgomery lost his leg in 2017 when a truck operated by Caribe Transport struck him on an Illinois highway. The load had been arranged by C. H. Robinson, the largest freight broker in the country.

At the time Robinson selected it, Caribe held a conditional safety rating from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, with documented deficiencies in driver qualification, hours of service, and vehicle maintenance. That is not private information.

It sits in a public federal database that anyone with an internet connection can query in under a minute. The question the Court answered was whether a jury may ask why no one did.

The commentary since has been a wall of client alerts aimed at brokers: document your vetting, formalize your carrier selection criteria, expect discovery into your safety screening. All correct. All missing the larger point. There is a category of company that sits closer to the crash than any broker ever has. The broker picks who hauls a load.

The shipper picks who gets the freight. In an earlier decision, a leasing company looked at the carrier, ran whatever checks they ran, if they checked anything at all, and handed the truck to them.

The commercial equipment leasing and rental industry, the Ryders and Penskes and Idealeases and Enterprise Truck Rentals of the world, put a meaningful share of America’s power units on the road under other companies’ operating authority.

As someone who regularly sees these entities listed as co-defendants in crashes, I was surprised that nobody in the post-Montgomery conversation has noticed: their liability shield was never the one the brokers just lost.

It is a different statute entirely, it never provided categorical immunity, and the reasoning the Supreme Court just adopted applies to them with more force than it ever applied to a broker. First, the disclosure.

I currently serve as a retained expert witness in multiple active matters in which equipment lessors have been named as codefendants alongside motor carriers, and nothing in this article draws on any of those case files.

Every factual claim here traces to the Supreme Court’s published opinion, the United States Code, federal regulatory data and court records. Two shields To see what Montgomery actually changed, you have to understand that brokers and lessors have been standing behind two completely different legal walls.

The brokers’ wall was the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act of 1994, a deregulation statute that preempts state laws related to a price, route or service of a motor carrier or broker.

For years, brokers argued that a lawsuit accusing them of negligently selecting a carrier was really a state trying to regulate their services, and therefore federally barred. Several federal appeals courts agreed.

The result was a defense that worked at the motion to dismiss stage, before discovery, before a jury, before anyone examined what the broker actually knew. That is the wall that came down on May 14.

The Court held that the statute’s safety exception, which preserves state authority over motor vehicle safety, saves these claims, because a duty of care in selecting the company whose trucks will be on the highway plainly concerns those trucks.

The lessors’ wall is the Graves Amendment, a provision slipped into a 2005 highway bill after jury verdicts in vehicle rental cases grew large enough that at least one major rental company threatened to pull out of entire states. The amendment, codified at 49 U. S. C.

30106, preempts state laws that made vehicle owners vicariously liable for their renters’ driving. Before Graves, states like New York and Florida held the owner of a vehicle responsible for the negligence of whoever was driving it, simply by virtue of ownership.

Graves ended that for companies engaged in the trade or business of renting or leasing motor vehicles. The difference between the two walls is the entire story. Graves protection applies only where there is no negligence or criminal wrongdoing by the owner. The shield covers liability based solely on ownership.

It has never covered the leasing company’s own conduct. Negligent maintenance claims survived Graves. Negligent entrustment claims survived Graves. A claim that the rental company itself failed to exercise reasonable care in the transaction was never preempted, not in 2005 and not today. Brokers had categorical immunity and just lost it. Lessors never had c