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524US2

Unit: U100

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802

FARAGHER v. BOCA RATON

Opinion of the Court

ously liable for its servant’s abuse of apparent authority.
Brief for Respondent 30–31, and n. 24. But this narrow
reading is untenable; it would render the second qualiﬁcation
of § 219(2)(d) almost entirely superﬂuous (and would seem to
ask us to shut our eyes to the potential effects of supervisory
authority, even when not explicitly invoked). The illustra-
tions accompanying this subsection make clear that it covers
not only cases involving the abuse of apparent authority, but
also cases in which tortious conduct is made possible or
facilitated by the existence of the actual agency relationship.
See Restatement § 219, Comment e (noting employer liability
where “the servant may be able to cause harm because of
his position as agent, as where a telegraph operator sends
false messages purporting to come from third persons” and
where the manager who operates a store “for an undisclosed
principal is enabled to cheat the customers because of his
position”); id., § 247, Illustration 1 (noting a newspaper’s lia-
bility for a libelous editorial published by an editor acting
for his own purposes).

We therefore agree with Faragher that in implementing
Title VII it makes sense to hold an employer vicariously lia-
ble for some tortious conduct of a supervisor made possible
by abuse of his supervisory authority, and that the aided-by-
agency-relation principle embodied in § 219(2)(d) of the Re-
statement provides an appropriate starting point for deter-
mining liability for the kind of harassment presented here.3
Several courts, indeed, have noted what Faragher has ar-
gued, that there is a sense in which a harassing supervisor
is always assisted in his misconduct by the supervisory rela-
tionship. See, e. g., Rodgers v. Western-Southern Life Ins.

3 We say “starting point” because our obligation here is not to make a
pronouncement of agency law in general or to transplant § 219(2)(d) into
Title VII. Rather, it is to adapt agency concepts to the practical objec-
tives of Title VII. As we said in Meritor Savings Bank, FSB v. Vinson,
477 U. S. 57, 72 (1986), “common-law principles may not be transferable in
all their particulars to Title VII.”