The Supreme Court unanimously rejected New Jersey Transit Corporation’s claims of immunity from lawsuits in other states, ruling on Wednesday that the independent entity is not an arm of the New Jersey government.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor penned the ruling in the consolidated cases of Galette v. New Jersey Transit Corporation and New Jersey Transit Corporation v. Colt, finding that lawsuits filed in Pennsylvania and New York courts against the corporation over accidents where people were injured by NJ Transit buses in Philadelphia and New York City, respectively, may move forward.
“States are generally entitled to immunity from being sued in another State’s courts without their consent,” Sotomayor wrote. “That sovereign immunity is personal to the State and thus extends only to arms of the State itself, not to legally independent entities that the State creates.”
Sotomayor wrote that “NJ Transit is not an arm of New Jersey” and that it is a “legally separate entity,” meaning it can be sued outside the Garden State. Her opinion pointed to the state’s lack of responsibility for debts or other liabilities incurred by NJ Transit, as well as state law that designates the corporation as independent of supervision by the state transportation department.
“This level of control does not meaningfully affect NJ Transit’s status, given the fact that it is a legally separate corporation and is responsible for its own judgments,” Sotomayor wrote, also noting that the governor’s ability to remove board members is limited and can only be invoked for cause.
The ruling spells out that corporations created by the state do not inherently get the same type of sovereign immunity as the state itself is afforded in law, but the justices added that a state may always change the corporations’ makeup to put them back under the umbrella of immunity that state entities receive.
“To the extent New Jersey, and other States, created such corporate entities intending that they would remain part of the State and that the State would formally assume their liabilities, the States are always free to amend their laws,” Sotomayor said.
The unanimous ruling overturns a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling that found NJ Transit was an arm of the state and therefore could not be sued in outside state courts, and it affirms a New York Court of Appeals ruling which found NJ Transit was not an arm of New Jersey’s state government.
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The ruling only featured Sotomayor’s opinion and did not include any concurring opinions from any of the other eight justices. It comes less than two months after the justices heard arguments in the case, marking the first ruling of the term for a case heard in 2026.
The Supreme Court has not scheduled its next opinion release day, but it is expected to hold another one in the coming weeks, with all rulings for the term set to be released by the end of June. Oral arguments for the current term will continue through the end of April, with the justices set to hear arguments in cases involving late-arriving ballot laws and President Donald Trump’s birthright citizenship order in the coming weeks.