Opinion ID: 2633383
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: burk liability rests solely on public policy

Text: ¶ 6 There appears to be a lack of symmetry in this court's extant Burk jurisprudence. In Tate v. Browning-Ferris, Inc., [7] we found from sources of state statutory and federal constitutional law a command for equal on-the-job treatment of persons of African descent. The breach of public policy for which Tate allowed a Burk action was rested on a violation of: (1) the Oklahoma Anti-Discrimination Act (AODA) [8] and of (2) the extant U.S. Supreme Court's XIVth Amendment jurisprudence. [9] The latter legal source, part of this Nation's fundamental law since 1868, has served as a basis for articulated national public policy for all the States. ¶ 7 In Brown v. Ford, [10] a claim of sexual harassment created by a hostile work environment, for wrongful termination, and for sexual battery, we neither accepted nor rejected federal law as a basis for Oklahoma's public policy. Because Oklahoma's common law afforded Brown an ample remedy by an action for assault and battery, it was unnecessary to decide whether a Burk claim also would lie. ¶ 8 It was in List v. Anchor Paint Mfg. Co., [11] and Marshall v. OK Rental & Leasing, Inc., [12] that the court's analysis became less than clear. The question dealt with there was whether constructive-discharge claims based on age discrimination (in List ) and on sexual harassment by hostile work environment (in Marshall ) were also actionable as a Burk tort. The court rejected the plaintiff-pressed notion of liability by pronouncing that both age discrimination and hostile work environment's brand of sexual harassment were adequately covered by legislation. [13] The court's language in List and Marshall enmeshed the public-policy prong of the Burk analysis with the notion that the type of discrimination whose presence must be found  in an act or vis-á-vis one's status was determinative of whether a claim may be deemed actionable. [14] Today's opinion, whose text appears slightly to retreat from reliance on the conduct-versus-status dichotomy, [15] implicitly recognizes the fallacy of yesteryear's imprimatur. ¶ 9 List and Marshall are, in my view, best understood when rested on a different analysis. In the former case (List), the state age discrimination statute, [16] which appeared to occupy the entire field, was deemed to have provided the plaintiff with an exclusive remedial vindication. In the latter case (Marshall), the hostile work environment claim was sought to be drawn along lines paralleling the invoked federal Title VII jurisprudence, [17] which, like federal statutory law, does not eo ipso fit into the framework of public policy binding on Oklahoma. There was simply no mandated Oklahoma public policy on which Marshall's claim could be founded. Moreover, at least some of this court's members must surely have had apprehension of embracing much of what is now in the body of federal hostile-work-environment jurisprudence. The tilt of that decisional law appears destined to reach a collision course with permissible time-and-place restrictions on one's freedom of speech. Its trend is most clearly divinable when a federal claim is allowed to be grounded solely in on-the-job utterances perceived to be offensive to the tastes of some work force component. To do less than reject out-of-hand the overbroad judicial construction of federal sex discrimination statutes would contravene the generous protection of free speech [18] afforded by this State's own fundamental law, Art. 2, § 22, Okl. Const. [19] The States are entirely free to protect the right of expression with greater solicitude and within a wider dimensional range of immunity than the shield available under the U.S. Constitution. [20] ¶ 10 Finally, in Collier v. Insignia Financial Group , [21] we applied, in the context of a Burk tort, a legislative command [22] that condemns certain offensive discriminatory practices. There we declared that the so-called quid pro quo conduct  the oldest and crudest form of employment-connected harm to economically dependent and disadvantaged victims  lies clearly within the core concept of state law's prohibition against gender-based on-the-job discrimination. ¶ 11 My own review of the court's recent Burk -tort case law reveals that the decisions may indeed be regarded as symmetrical when analyzed in light of the public policy's breach on which the claim's gravamen stood grounded.