Galette v. New Jersey Transit Corp.
The Court holds that New Jersey Transit is not an arm of New Jersey and so cannot claim the State's interstate sovereign immunity when it is sued in another State's courts. New Jersey built it as a legally separate corporation that can sue and be sued and is responsible for its own debts and judgments, and the State's substantial control over it does not change that.
Case background
In 1979, the New Jersey Legislature created the New Jersey Transit Corporation (NJ Transit) as a “body corporate and politic with corporate succession” and an “instrumentality of the State exercising public and essential governmental functions,” independent of any supervision or control by the State’s Department of Transportation. The State gave NJ Transit broad corporate powers, including the power to sue and be sued, make contracts, acquire property, and raise funds, and its organic statute provides that its debts and liabilities are not debts or liabilities of the State. The Governor may remove Board members and veto Board actions. In 2017, Jeffrey Colt was struck by an NJ Transit bus in Midtown Manhattan; a year later, Cedric Galette was injured when an NJ Transit bus crashed into the car he was riding in in Philadelphia. Both sued NJ Transit for negligence in their home state courts, and NJ Transit moved to dismiss, arguing that it is an arm of New Jersey entitled to sovereign immunity. The New York Court of Appeals held that NJ Transit is not an arm of New Jersey; the Pennsylvania Supreme Court held the opposite. This Court granted certiorari and consolidated the cases to resolve the conflict.
Questions Presented
(1) Whether the New Jersey Transit Corporation is an arm of the State of New Jersey for interstate sovereign immunity purposes.
Holding
NJ Transit is not an arm of New Jersey and thus is not entitled to share in New Jersey’s interstate sovereign immunity. Sovereign immunity is personal to the State and extends only to arms of the State itself, not to legally independent entities the State creates. The Court’s precedents ask chiefly whether the State structured the entity as legally separate, with the corporate form the clearest evidence, and whether the State is formally liable for the entity’s judgments; control is considered only with caution. New Jersey created NJ Transit as a body corporate with typical corporate powers, the State is not formally liable for its debts, and the State’s control over it does not meaningfully affect that status. The judgment of the New York Court of Appeals is affirmed, the judgment of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court is reversed, and both cases are remanded.
The Court
Justice Sotomayor delivered the opinion for a unanimous Court.
What this episode contains
This episode is an AI-narrated reading of the majority opinion in Galette v. New Jersey Transit Corp., written by Justice Sotomayor.
AI disclosure: The voice in this episode is AI-generated, using a machine learning model styled to loosely resemble the authoring justice. Tone, inflection, pacing, and emphasis are artifacts of the model and should not be attributed to Justice Sotomayor. The text being read is the Court’s published majority opinion, lightly adapted to improve readability for the spoken format.