On May 14, 2026, a unanimous Supreme Court handed down its decision in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, ruling that the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act (FAAAA) does not preempt state-law negligent-hiring claims against freight brokers. For people who have been catastrophically injured by unsafe trucking operations—and for the lawyers who represent them—this is one of the most consequential transportation-law decisions in years. Hilton Parker is proud to have participated in the case as counsel for an amicus curiae, and we want to explain what the Court decided, why it got it right, and where our own argument fits into the picture.

The Facts

The case arose from a devastating crash. Shawn Montgomery’s tractor-trailer was stopped on the side of an Illinois road when it was struck by a truck driven by Yosniel Varela-Mojena, who was hauling a load of plastic pots. Montgomery’s leg had to be amputated, and he sustained other severe and permanent injuries.

Varela-Mojena was driving for Caribe Transport, a motor carrier. But the company that had arranged the shipment was C.H. Robinson—a freight broker. Brokers, as Justice Barrett put it, are “the transportation industry’s matchmakers,” connecting companies that need goods moved with the carriers who move them. Roughly 28,000 brokers now arrange transportation for about a third of all freight shipped in the United States.

Montgomery sued the carrier, the driver, and the broker. As to C.H. Robinson, he alleged negligent hiring: Caribe Transport had a “conditional” safety rating from federal regulators—flagged for deficiencies in driver qualifications, hours of service, vehicle maintenance, and crash rate—and Montgomery claimed C.H. Robinson knew or should have known that hiring such a carrier was reasonably likely to put dangerous trucks on the road.

The district court and the Seventh Circuit both held that the FAAAA preempted the claim, following the Seventh Circuit’s earlier decision in Ye v. GlobalTranz Enterprises. Because the federal courts of appeals were split—the Sixth and Ninth Circuits had gone the other way—the Supreme Court granted certiorari.

What the Court Held

The FAAAA preempts state laws “related to a price, route, or service” of a motor carrier or broker “with respect to the transportation of property.” But the statute contains an important carve-out, the safety exception, which provides that the preemption clause “shall not restrict the safety regulatory authority of a State with respect to motor vehicles.”

Writing for a unanimous Court, Justice Barrett framed the question simply. Everyone agreed that common-law tort duties are part of a state’s authority to regulate safety. So the case came down to whether a negligent-hiring claim against a broker is a claim “with respect to motor vehicles.”

The Court held that it is. Giving “with respect to” its ordinary meaning of “concerning” or “regarding”—the same construction it had adopted in Dan’s City Used Cars, Inc. v. Pelkey—and reading it together with the statutory definition of “motor vehicle,” the Court concluded that a claim is “with respect to motor vehicles” if it concerns the vehicles used in transportation. Requiring C.H. Robinson to exercise ordinary care in selecting a carrier plainly “concerns” motor vehicles—”most obviously, the trucks that will transport the goods.” The claim therefore fell within the safety exception and was saved from preemption.

The Court methodically dismantled the brokers’ counterarguments. It explained that reading the safety exception this way does not swallow the preemption clause whole—the exception saves only the subset of claims that concern motor vehicle safety, while state laws governing prices, routes, and services with no safety dimension remain preempted. It rejected the surplusage argument, noting that any overlap in the statute comes from the reference to “safety,” not from how broadly “with respect to motor vehicles” is read. And as to the much-discussed anomaly between subsection (c)—which contains a safety exception—and subsection (b)—which preempts intrastate broker regulation and does not—the Court acknowledged the puzzle but refused to let it override the text: “Better to live with the mystery than to rewrite the statute.”

The judgment of the Seventh Circuit was reversed and remanded.

Why the Decision Is Right

The result is faithful to both the text and the purpose of the statute. The FAAAA was an economic-deregulation measure. When Congress dismantled federal economic regulation of the trucking industry, it wanted to stop states from refilling the gap with their own economic regulation. What it did not want—and what the safety exception protects against—was safety deregulation. Reading the statute to immunize brokers from ordinary tort liability would have done exactly what Congress disclaimed: it would have carved a hole in the safety regime, allowing brokers to operate, in Justice Kavanaugh’s words, “in a black hole with no meaningful safety-related regulation.”

That last point matters because, as the Court recognized, federal law does very little to police how brokers select carriers. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration requires brokers only to choose a federally registered carrier; it imposes no real safety obligations on the hiring decision itself. Justice Kavanaugh, concurring (joined by Justice Alito), candidly described the case as closer than the majority opinion might suggest, and he gave the brokers credit for several genuinely difficult points. But in the end he reached the same conclusion: it is “hard to read the statute as written and conclude that Congress subtly sliced and diced state tort law” so that trucking companies face liability for crashes while the brokers who hire them do not. Truck safety, he emphasized, “is a matter of life and death”—roughly 5,000 deaths and 114,000 injuries from truck crashes in a single recent year.

Importantly, the decision does not turn brokers into insurers. As even Montgomery’s counsel stressed, a broker that acts reasonably and hires reputable carriers should be able to defend these suits, and the ordinary proximate-cause requirement of state tort law remains a meaningful check. The holding simply means that a broker who disregards a carrier’s poor safety record cannot hide behind a federal economic-deregulation statute.

Hilton Parker LLC’s Role: The Franco Amicus Brief

Hilton Parker LLC filed an amicus brief in support of the petitioner on behalf of Gergana Franco, a private plaintiff with her own pending negligent-contracting case, Franco v. BRNV Inc. (S.D. Ohio). Ms. Franco’s father was killed when two drivers who could not speak or read English ran out of gas in the middle of a lane on I-75; the defendant in her case argues the FAAAA preempts her claim. Because the Court’s ruling would govern her case through stare decisis, Ms. Franco had a direct interest in having her counsel’s argument presented to the Court.

Our brief advanced a distinct—and more far-reaching—argument than the one the petitioner principally pressed. We argued that the FAAAA’s preemption clause does not reach generally applicable common-law negligence claims at all, so the Court never needs to reach the safety exception in the first place.

The argument is built on Justice Scalia’s textualism. The preemption clause reaches only laws “with respect to the transportation of property,” a phrase the Court in Dan’s City said “massively limits the scope” of preemption. Drawing on Justice Scalia’s Ours Garage dissent—which Dan’s City cited with approval—we argued that the FAAAA preempts only laws that “single out” the transportation industry for special treatment. State common-law negligence is not such a law. It applies across all industries and walks of life; it is neutral as to whether a defendant is a broker, a carrier, or anyone else. It therefore falls outside the preemption clause entirely.

We also identified what we view as the analytical error in cases like Ye: those courts borrowed preemption reasoning from Airline Deregulation Act (ADA) cases, but the ADA lacks the FAAAA’s limiting phrase “with respect to the transportation of property.” The two statutes are not interchangeable, and treating them as such produced the incongruous result that negligent-hiring claims are somehow “with respect to the transportation of property” but not “with respect to motor vehicles.” As we put it, treating identical words identically, these claims must be either “with respect to” both (as the petitioner contended) or “with respect to” neither (as we argued)—but the divergent reading the brokers asked for cannot be squared with the statute.

Our brief also compiled an extensive appendix cataloging decades of lower-court decisions—federal district courts, state appellate courts, and state trial courts across the country—that had rejected these broker-preemption arguments, documenting what one court called the “near-universal” pre-Ye consensus.

Attorneys Jonathan L. Hilton (counsel of record) and Geoffrey C. Parker of Hilton Parker LLC authored the brief and attended the oral argument before the Court on March 4, 2026.

The Court Left Our Primary Question Open—Footnotes 2 and 3

Here is what makes the decision especially significant for Ms. Franco’s case and for the broader fight: the Court expressly did not decide the question our brief raised.

In footnote 2, the Court wrote: “Because we hold that the safety exception applies, we assume without deciding that 49 U.S.C. §14501(c)(1) would otherwise preempt Montgomery’s negligent-hiring claim.” In other words, the Court resolved the case on the safety exception and deliberately left open the antecedent question we pressed—whether the preemption clause reaches these claims at all. That issue remains live and undecided in the lower courts, and our textual argument survives fully intact.

And in footnote 3, the Court engaged directly with the line of reasoning at the heart of our brief. Discussing Dan’s City, the Court reaffirmed that the phrase “transportation of property” “massively limits the scope of preemption” in the FAAAA—the precise point our brief built upon. The Court was careful to add that it was not holding that the words “with respect to” greatly limit the scope of preemption generally, distinguishing the brokers’ attempt to stretch that phrase. The Court’s treatment of Dan’s City confirms that the textual foundation of our argument—the limiting force of “transportation of property”—is good law and well understood by the Court.

The upshot: a unanimous Supreme Court reached the pro-victim result on the safety exception, and it did so without foreclosing—indeed, while reinforcing the textual premises of—the broader argument we advanced on Ms. Franco’s behalf. That argument lives to fight another day.

How Our Argument Surfaced at Oral Argument

Although the argument time belonged to the parties and the Solicitor General, several of the threads our brief pulled on ran through the argument session.

Justice Barrett zeroed in on the strategic choice between the two grounds. In a colloquy with petitioner’s counsel Paul Clement, she pressed exactly the question our brief raised: if a Justice believed the claim “might win under (c)(1) because I don’t think it’s preempted,” was there any reason to decide the case on the safety exception instead? Clement acknowledged that under those circumstances “there’s not much” advantage to reaching the safety exception. He counseled, however, that because the parallel ADA preemption question is “a hard one” with potential “carryover effects,” the Court might prefer to “hold that issue . . . harmless” and decide the case on the safety-exception text that “is not in the ADA.” Justice Barrett then confirmed the corollary—that anything the Court said about the safety exception would not prejudice the (c)(1) question, “because the text is the same in the ADA”—and Clement agreed. That exchange is precisely the path the Court ultimately took in footnote 2, expressly reserving the (c)(1) question.

The “single out” / generally-applicable-law theory was in the air through the ADA discussion. Our brief’s core move is that the FAAAA, unlike the ADA, contains the limiting “transportation of property” language, so ADA cases cannot simply be transplanted. Clement repeatedly invoked the way “lower courts have read the ADA” to preserve ordinary tort suits, and noted that the breadth of the statutory definition of “transportation” is “maybe one more reason” the Court might conclude “the preemption clause doesn’t apply here at all to safety torts a la the lower court handling of the ADA cases.” Justice Kagan and the Solicitor General’s office (Mr. Joshi) then sparred over the definition of “transportation” and whether reading “with respect to motor vehicles” broadly would create surplusage—the same definitional terrain our brief mapped in distinguishing the two statutes.

Justice Jackson’s questioning tracked the generally-applicable-law point closely. She repeatedly characterized the statute as one concerned with economic deregulation, not with dictating “the particular defendants who are going to be sued at the end of the day.” In her words, Congress was effectively saying, “Those who are regulating safety, carry on”—if a state’s tort applied to brokers as well as truckers, “Congress wasn’t bothering that.” That is a close cousin of our argument that a status-neutral, generally applicable body of negligence law simply falls outside what Congress preempted.

The Dan’s City “massively limits” principle—the linchpin of footnote 3—was contested head-on. Respondents’ counsel Theodore Boutrous leaned on Dan’s City to argue that “with respect to motor vehicles” is “massively limiting” and narrowly confined to the truck itself. We had argued the opposite inference from the same case: that the genuinely limiting phrase is “transportation of property,” and that the limitation cannot be selectively applied to the safety exception while ignoring it in the preemption clause. The Court’s footnote 3 ultimately sided with the narrower, careful reading of Dan’s City that our brief urged—confirming that “transportation of property” does the limiting work, and declining to give “with respect to” the sweeping limiting force the brokers wanted.

While no advocate stood up specifically for Ms. Franco’s “single out” theory—the parties litigated the case primarily on the safety exception—the questioning repeatedly circled the textual and structural points our brief developed, and the Court’s ultimate disposition leaves that theory open and its premises endorsed.

What This Means Going Forward

For injured people and their families, Caribe Transport closes off a powerful defense that brokers had increasingly used to escape accountability. A broker that ignores a carrier’s documented safety problems can no longer claim that federal law immunizes it. For the trucking ecosystem, the decision creates exactly the incentive the safety exception was meant to preserve: brokers now have a strong reason to do business only with safe and reliable carriers.

For Hilton Parker LLC and our clients, the decision is doubly encouraging. Not only did the Court reach the right result, it did so on narrow grounds that leave our broader textual argument—that these claims are never preempted in the first place—fully available for the cases still to come.

This post is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Hilton Parker LLC filed an amicus curiae brief in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC on behalf of Gergana Franco in support of the petitioner.