Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/524bv.pdf
Page Number: 821.0

524US2

Unit: U100

[09-15-00 14:43:08] PAGES PGT: OPIN

776

FARAGHER v. BOCA RATON

Syllabus

tems, Inc., 510 U. S. 17, 21–22, its cases have established few deﬁnitive
rules for determining when an employer will be liable for a discrimina-
tory environment that is otherwise actionably abusive. The Court’s
only discussion to date of the standards of employer liability came in
Meritor, supra, where the Court held that traditional agency principles
were relevant for determining employer liability. Although the Court
cited the Restatement §§ 219–237 with general approval, the Court cau-
tioned that common-law agency principles might not be transferable in
all their particulars. Pp. 786–792.

(b) Restatement § 219(1) provides that “a master is subject to liability
for the torts of his servants committed while acting in the scope of their
employment.” Although Title VII cases in the Courts of Appeals have
typically held, or assumed, that supervisory sexual harassment falls out-
side the scope of employment because it is motivated solely by individual
desires and serves no purpose of the employer, these cases appear to be
in tension with others deﬁning the scope of the employment broadly to
hold employers vicariously liable for employees’ intentional torts, includ-
ing sexual assaults, that were not done to serve the employer, but were
deemed to be characteristic of its activities or a foreseeable consequence
of its business. This tension is the result of differing judgments about
the desirability of holding an employer liable for his subordinates’ way-
ward behavior. The proper analysis here, then, calls not for a mechani-
cal application of indeﬁnite and malleable factors set forth in the Re-
statement, but rather an enquiry into whether it is proper to conclude
that sexual harassment is one of the normal risks of doing business
the employer should bear. An employer can reasonably anticipate the
possibility of sexual harassment occurring in the workplace, and this
might justify the assignment of the costs of this behavior to the em-
ployer rather than to the victim. Two things counsel in favor of the
contrary conclusion, however. First, there is no reason to suppose that
Congress wished courts to ignore the traditional distinction between
acts falling within the scope of employment and acts amounting to what
the older law called frolics or detours from the course of employment.
Second, the lower courts, by uniformly judging employer liability for
co-worker harassment under a negligence standard, have implicitly
treated such harassment outside the scope of employment.
It is un-
likely that such treatment would escape efforts to render them obsolete
if the Court held that harassing supervisors necessarily act within the
scope of their employment. The rationale for doing so would apply
when the behavior was that of coemployees, because the employer gen-
erally beneﬁts from the work of common employees as from the work
of supervisors. The answer to this argument might be that the scope
of supervisory employment may be treated separately because super-