Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/524bv.pdf
Page Number: 845.0

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Unit: U100

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FARAGHER v. BOCA RATON

Opinion of the Court

propriate corrective action”); 3 L. Larson & A. Larson, Em-
ployment Discrimination § 46.07[4][a], p. 46–101 (2d ed. 1998)
(courts “uniformly” apply Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission (EEOC) rule; “[i]t is not a controversial area”).
If, indeed, the cases did not rest, at least implicitly, on the
notion that such harassment falls outside the scope of em-
ployment, their liability issues would have turned simply on
the application of the scope-of-employment rule. Cf. Hunter
v. Allis-Chalmers, Inc., 797 F. 2d 1417, 1422 (CA7 1986) (not-
ing that employer will not usually be liable under respondeat
superior for employee’s racial harassment because it “would
be the rare case where racial harassment .
. could be
thought by the author of the harassment to help the employ-
er’s business”).

.

It is quite unlikely that these cases would escape efforts
to render them obsolete if we were to hold that supervisors
who engage in discriminatory harassment are necessarily
acting within the scope of their employment. The rationale
for placing harassment within the scope of supervisory au-
thority would be the fairness of requiring the employer to
bear the burden of foreseeable social behavior, and the same
rationale would apply when the behavior was that of co-
employees. The employer generally beneﬁts just as obvi-
ously from the work of common employees as from the work
of supervisors; they simply have different jobs to do, all
aimed at the success of the enterprise. As between an inno-
cent employer and an innocent employee, if we use scope-of-
employment reasoning to require the employer to bear the
cost of an actionably hostile workplace created by one class
of employees (i. e., supervisors), it could appear just as ap-
propriate to do the same when the environment was created
by another class (i. e., co-workers).

The answer to this argument might well be to point out
that the scope of supervisory employment may be treated
separately by recognizing that supervisors have special
authority enhancing their capacity to harass, and that the