Opinion ID: 1374778
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: the common-law claim

Text: As we understand the fourth question, it calls upon us to answer the following: Is a discharge in culmination of (or connection with) work-related or on-the-job sexual harassment in breach of public policy and hence actionable under the Burk [29] exception? The plaintiff presses us for a sweeping pronouncement which would hold that because the workplace discrimination provisions of Oklahoma's Anti-Discrimination Act declare an across-the-board public policy exception to the at-will employment doctrine, [30] her termination should be deemed actionable against the Firm as a common-law tort. The body of our common law, which serves to supplement the corpus of statutory enactments, is powerless to abrogate the latter, either in whole or in part. [31] Validly expressed legislative will must always control over contrary notions of the unwritten law. [32] When in pari materia, statutory law and the precepts of either pre-existing or after-declared common law are to be construed together as one consistent and harmonious whole. Once an interaction of the two sources has been measured by these principles, it is clear that even if Oklahoma's common law did recognize a discharge in culmination of work-related (or on-the-job) sexual harassment [33] as a Burk tort  a question which need not be answered today  Brown's common-law claim would not be actionable as a discharge in breach of public policy because her employer, who engaged fewer than fifteen employees, is outside the Act's purview. As stated earlier in this opinion, we will not pause to consider today whether the Burk exception may generally be invoked to press a claim for wrongful discharge in culmination of work-related (or on-the-job) sexual harassment by hostile work environment against an employer who is subject to statutory anti-discrimination remedies.