WASHINGTON — NJ Transit will face lawsuits from out-of-state courts after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the transit agency is not entitled to “sovereign immunity,” the principle that one state cannot be sued in another state’s court.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in the decision for a unanimous court, wrote that “sovereign immunity is personal to the state and thus extends only to arms of the state itself, not to legally independent agencies that the state creates.”
Such agencies have a “separate legal personhood,” she wrote, allowing them to sue or be sued.
The case stems from two incidents involving NJ Transit bus accidents, Courthouse News Service reports. One involves a passenger in a car hit by an NJ Transit bus in Philadelphia and the other a pedestrian hit by one of the agency’s buses in Manhattan. New York’s state Supreme Court had ruled that the injured party in the latter incident could sue, while the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had ruled the opposite.
The New Jersey Monitor reports there are constitutional reasons to establish an agency as a separate corporation; the state’s constitution caps the number of allowable state departments at 20; and separately structured agencies like NJ Transit do not count against that total.
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