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524US2

Unit: U100

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796

FARAGHER v. BOCA RATON

Opinion of the Court

assistant raped patient).2 The rationales for these decisions
have varied, with some courts echoing Bushey in explaining
that the employee’s acts were foreseeable and that the em-
ployer should in fairness bear the resulting costs of doing
business, see, e. g., Mary M., supra, at 218, 814 P. 2d, at 1350,
and others ﬁnding that the employee’s sexual misconduct
arose from or was in some way related to the employee’s
essential duties. See, e. g., Samuels, supra, at 574 (tortious
conduct was “reasonably incidental” to the performance of
the nursing assistant’s duties in caring for a “helpless” pa-
tient in a “locked environment”).

An assignment to reconcile the run of the Title VII cases
with those just cited would be a taxing one. Here it is
enough to recognize that their disparate results do not neces-
sarily reﬂect wildly varying terms of the particular employ-
ment contracts involved, but represent differing judgments
about the desirability of holding an employer liable for his
subordinates’ wayward behavior.
In the instances in which
there is a genuine question about the employer’s responsibil-
ity for harmful conduct he did not in fact authorize, a holding
that the conduct falls within the scope of employment ul-
timately expresses a conclusion not of fact but of law. As
one eminent authority has observed, the “highly indeﬁnite
phrase” is “devoid of meaning in itself ” and is “obviously
no more than a bare formula to cover the unordered and
unauthorized acts of the servant for which it is found to be
expedient to charge the master with liability, as well as to
exclude other acts for which it is not.” W. Keeton, D.
Dobbs, R. Keeton, & D. Owen, Prosser and Keaton on Law
of Torts 502 (5th ed. 1984); see also Seavey, Speculations as
to “Respondeat Superior,” in Studies in Agency 129, 155

2 It bears noting that many courts in non-Title VII cases have held sex-
ual assaults to fall outside the scope of employment. See Note, “Scope of
Employment” Redeﬁned: Holding Employers Vicariously Liable for Sexual
Assaults Committed by their Employees, 76 Minn. L. Rev. 1513, 1521–1522,
and nn. 33, 34 (1992) (collecting cases).