In the Court's Own Words: What Montgomery Actually Said — and Why DOTScreener Was Built for It

Everyone in freight has now heard about the Supreme Court's decision in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II. Far fewer have read the words the Court actually used. That's a problem, because the holding is good news for careful operators — and the Justices were unusually specific about what "careful" looks like. The standard they described isn't vague. It's almost a product spec.

So let me do something the rest of the coverage mostly hasn't: quote the opinion directly, sentence by sentence, and show you how each line maps onto exactly what a defensible carrier-selection record needs to contain. Full disclosure up front — I'm the founder of DOTScreener, so read my framing as informed but interested. The quotes below aren't mine, though. They're the Court's, and you can check every one against the sources at the bottom.

The case, in one paragraph

On May 14, 2026, the Supreme Court decided Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, No. 24-1238, unanimously (9-0). Justice Barrett wrote the opinion; Justice Kavanaugh filed a concurrence joined by Justice Alito. The carrier in the chain was Caribe Transport II; the broker who tendered the load was C.H. Robinson. After a Caribe driver crossed into Shawn Montgomery and cost him his leg, Montgomery sued the broker for negligent selection of the carrier. The broker argued the claim was preempted by the federal FAAAA statute. The Court said no — the claim survives.

That's the headline. The detail is where it gets useful.

"Concerns motor vehicles" — why the federal shield fell

For roughly fifteen years, brokers leaned on the FAAAA (49 U.S.C. § 14501(c)) to argue that state negligence claims were preempted — knocked out of court before a jury ever heard them. The statute does broadly block state laws "related to" a broker's prices, routes, or services, but it carves out an exception for the states' authority over motor-vehicle safety. The whole case turned on whether a negligent-selection claim lives inside that safety carve-out.

Justice Barrett held that it does. In the Court's words, requiring a broker to —

— and therefore —

Read those two fragments slowly, because they set the standard for the entire industry now. The duty the Court endorsed isn't exotic. It's "ordinary care in selecting a carrier." Not perfection. Not omniscience. Ordinary, reasonable, prudent care — the same standard every business owes when it hires someone to do dangerous work. The federal escape hatch is closed; the claim goes to a jury; and the jury's question is simply: did you exercise ordinary care when you selected this carrier, and can you show it?

"Asking the hard questions" — the concurrence is a defense manual

If Justice Barrett's opinion is the bad news for careless brokers, Justice Kavanaugh's concurrence (joined by Justice Alito) is the road map for careful ones. It's the part every broker and shipper should actually frame on the wall, because it tells you how to win. In the concurrence's words, brokers —

and —

This is the Supreme Court of the United States telling you, on the record, that liability is avoidable — that the door it just opened has a defense built into it. But look at what the defense requires, in the Court's own framing:

1. You "acted reasonably" — you applied a standard, not a vibe.

2. You "arranged transportation with reputable trucking companies" — you actually looked at the carrier's record and it held up.

3. You were "asking the hard questions of the carrier" — you put questions to the carrier and captured the answers.

That is not an abstract legal principle. That is a checklist. And the only failure mode it leaves open is doing all three things invisibly — being careful in a way you can't later prove. A reasonable decision nobody can reconstruct three years later looks, from the witness stand, identical to no decision at all.

Mapping the Court's words to what you actually need

Put the quotes side by side with what a negligent-selection defense has to contain, and the spec writes itself:

Now read the right-hand column straight down. A per-load record, scored against a written standard, built on live FMCSA data, backed by the carrier's signed attestation, frozen with a verifiable timestamp. That column isn't a marketing wish list. It's a paraphrase of five sentences the Supreme Court just published.

Why DOTScreener fits the spec the Court wrote

Here's where the interested-founder part comes in, and I'll keep it honest. DOTScreener wasn't built backward from "what data can we show you." It was built backward from the deposition — from the question "can you prove you were careful that day?" — which is now, almost word for word, the question Montgomery puts to every broker and the shippers behind them. So the mapping isn't a coincidence:

• "In selecting a carrier" → every DOTScreener record is per-load, per-decision — one screen, one tender, one carrier — not an account-level "we monitor everyone."
• "Acted reasonably" → every screen is scored against your written, versioned policy, so the record shows the standard you applied, not just raw numbers a juror has to interpret.
• "Reputable trucking companies" → the screen pulls the carrier's live FMCSA safety profile at tender time — the rating, the Alert-status BASICs, the OOS and crash signals — the exact "reputable-or-not" picture the Court is pointing at.
• "Asking the hard questions of the carrier" → the carrier's signed attestation is captured in the same record, so if they misrepresented something, your reliance was demonstrably reasonable.
• A claim litigated years later → the whole thing is frozen into a timestamped, SHA-256 tamper-evident Carrier Selection Defense Packet — the artifact you hand to counsel, built to survive discovery.

You can watch one get built or look at a sample record and check it against the table above yourself. I'd rather you do that than take my word for it.

The honest bottom line

I'm not going to tell you a software subscription makes you lawsuit-proof — no tool does, and after Montgomery anyone who promises that is selling you something. What I'll tell you is narrower and, I think, more useful: the Supreme Court just described, in plain and quotable language, what a defensible carrier-selection decision looks like — ordinary care, a reasonable standard, reputable carriers, hard questions asked — and it told you the brokers who do those things "should be able to successfully defend" themselves. DOTScreener is the tool I built to capture exactly those four things, in one per-load record, at the moment you tender, in a form that holds up years later.

The ruling is the standard now, for the whole industry. The operators who read the Court's actual words this month — not the headline, the words — and make sure they can produce what those words describe are the ones who'll be fine. That's the entire job. We just made it a button.

— Mason Lavallet

Founder, DOTScreener.com

Frequently Asked Questions

Did the Supreme Court actually require brokers to screen carriers?

Not in those words. The Court held that a state-law claim for negligent selection of a carrier survives FAAAA preemption because it "concerns motor vehicles" and falls within the statute's safety exception. The practical effect is that brokers now owe a duty of ordinary care when they select carriers, and Justice Kavanaugh's concurrence indicated brokers who "acted reasonably" and asked "the hard questions of the carrier" should be able to defend themselves. Screening is how you produce evidence that you met that duty.

What exactly did Justice Barrett's opinion say?

The unanimous opinion held that requiring a broker to "exercise ordinary care in selecting a carrier ... 'concerns' motor vehicles — most obviously, the trucks that will transport the goods," and therefore "falls within the ... safety exception, which saves it from preemption." In plain terms: the federal shield brokers relied on for years does not block these claims, and they now proceed to juries on the merits.

Does Montgomery apply to shippers too, or only brokers?

The case was about a broker (C.H. Robinson), but the duty of ordinary care in selecting who moves your freight is a general negligence principle, and plaintiffs' attorneys are already pressing the same theory against shippers who select carriers directly or who don't require their brokers to screen. If you choose — or contractually control who chooses — the carrier, the same "were you careful, can you prove it" question reaches you.

Is having Carrier411 or a monitoring tool enough after Montgomery?

Monitoring tools are excellent at the job they're built for — watching your roster and catching fraud — but they aren't built to freeze a per-load, timestamped, attestation-backed decision record. The Court's language points at the moment of selection; a live dashboard shows changing data and a screenshot of it is undated and policy-less. See Why Monitoring Tools Aren't Enough Post-Montgomery and the DOTScreener vs. Carrier411 breakdown.

Sources

• Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, No. 24-1238, 608 U.S. ___ (2026) — unanimous opinion (Barrett, J.); concurrence (Kavanaugh, J., joined by Alito, J.), decided May 14, 2026
• Crowell & Moring — "Bad Match, Big Consequences: Supreme Court Holds Freight Brokers Accountable for Negligent Carrier Selection"
• Burr & Forman — "Broker Beware: Supreme Court Greenlights Negligent Hiring and Selection Claims Against Transportation Brokers"
• Landline — "Supreme Court just raised the stakes for freight brokers hiring unsafe carriers"
• 49 U.S.C. § 14501(c) — FAAAA preemption and the motor-vehicle safety exception
• What Montgomery v. Caribe Means for Brokers and Shippers — the plain-English cornerstone
• FMCSA SAFER Company Snapshot — the underlying public safety data