We're making our roads safe one way or another.
The Supreme Court just handed down a ruling which will make trucking companies shake in their boots while billboard lawyers are dancing in the streets.
This expands your ability to sue freight companies if they hire trucking companies with bad safety ratings and cause a car accident.
Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC looked at a law called the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act, which bans states from imposing economic regulations (like rate controls, routing mandates, or service requirements) that could affect with the interstate flow of goods.
The law, however, also gives an exception where safety is concerned.
In this case, an Illinois man named Shawn Montgomery was hit by a speeding Caribe Transport truck in 2017 while his vehicle was stopped off the side of the road. He lost his leg. Lower courts ruled that the FAA law applied and the company, nor its parent company C.H. Robinson, was not liable.
This, despite the fact that Caribe Transport had a history of known safety issues (poor safety rating, driver qualifications problems, crash history).
In recent months, it has become apparent that tens of thousands - potentially hundreds of thousands - of truck drivers are on the roads who should not or are not legally licensed. Many of these are illegal aliens who cannot read English road signs and do not know American road laws. Many Americans have been killed in just the last year by migrant drivers. Total deaths from accidents with 18-wheelers have jumped 50% in the last 15 years.
New York and California, the two largest blue states in America, regularly hand out CDLs with "No Name Given" to illegal aliens. The problem is so bad that ICE can set up a checkpoint at a random stop in Oklahoma and pull 130 illegals off the road in three days.
Companies across the nation, even in "red" states like Ohio, advertise their CDL courses to migrant populations living in the U.S.
Until today, trucking companies were not liable for hiring these unvetted, unsafe, illegal drivers. They could point to a fraudulently obtained license out of a liberal state and say they thought the driver was legit. Whoever the driver killed while he was behind the wheel was not their problem. Lower courts agreed for years, including the Seventh Circuit. States could not penalize trucking companies for their hiring practices because it went against the "service" related to interstate transport.
SCOTUS, meanwhile, says the FAA law does not preempt these negligent hiring claims, ruling that states have authority to "safety regulatory authority" over motor vehicles (since they, not the U.S. government are the ones who issue motor licenses and registration).
This means logistics companies (and licensing states like New York!) must be MUCH more careful in vetting drivers.
You better believe this is going to put a lot of sketchy truckers for hire right out of business. I'm guessing many of them will be owned by guys named "Singh." These Sikh Indians have more than 12,000 trucking companies and now make up 20% of truck drivers in Canada and the United States (an estimated 150,000 of them), and hire almost exclusively Sikh employees, including relatives and friends who do not have work visas (see notable cases here, here, and here).
The stock market, that GDP line that too many "conservatives" care exclusively about, dropped after the ruling.
Average Americans are enthused, however. Higher litigation costs are expected to drop as companies implement hires of competent, legal drivers. This, in turn, will reduce the number of Americans wiped out in accidents with big rigs annually.
Now if only we could get the dockworker's unions to change their stupid rules so we didn't need so many trucks on the roads...
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