More States Adopt Laws Curbing Carrier Liability

This story appears in the Aug. 9 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

Florida and Louisiana are the latest states to adopt laws that protect carriers from being forced to assume unwarranted liabilities. They bring to 23 the number of states with anti-indemnification laws.

In Louisiana, a law takes effect Aug. 15 to protect truckers from being forced to sign contracts that make them liable if an accident occurs on a shipper or receiver’s property. Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) signed the law in June.

In Florida, the state’s new anti-indemnification law took effect on July 1, after Gov. Charlie Crist (R) signed it in June.

Anti-indemnification laws protect carriers from choosing between taking a load and refusing it because the contract requires the carrier to assume accident liabilities that otherwise the shipper or receiver would bear.

Cathy Gautreaux, executive director of the Louisiana Motor Transport Association, said the fight for the anti-indemnification law was the most “contentious” legislative battle she has ever experienced.

“ ‘Contentious’ is the polite version,” Gautreaux said.

The battle meant truckers had to go up against “legions of government affairs people, attorneys, lobbyists for big oil and the chemical [industry] and some manufacturers and some contactors, if you can believe it,” she said.

“So it was a pure David and Goliath situation — pure.”

The state-by-state fight to secure anti-indemnification laws is similar in every location, Gautreaux said.

“You’re fighting big money, but if you can pierce that veil and get to what’s right and appeal to [legislators’] sense of fairness, it’s what we did,” she said.

In all, six states adopted anti-indemnification laws this year, said Robert Pitcher, vice president for state laws in the law department of American Trucking Associations.

In addition to Florida and Louisiana, the six include Alaska, Connecticut, Iowa and Washington, Pitcher said.

ATA believes the success in getting anti-indemnification laws passed “has to do with the fact that most often contracts with provisions that shift liability for negligence in this way are what lawyers call contracts of adherence,” Pitcher said.

“That is, one party to the contract has such leverage, because of size or economic power, that it can dictate to the other party, smaller or weaker, just about whatever conditions it likes,” Pitcher said.

Shifting liability for one’s own negligence to another party ought to be against public policy, Pitcher said, because “it means that the party relieved of liability has less incentive to behave safely and responsibly, and the party saddled with the liability has no way of protecting itself, by insurance or safe behavior, or whatever.”