Opinion ID: 2510363
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 9

Heading: the employer's workers' compensation immunity from liability should be placed at and along the willful tort line

Text: ¶ 4 An employer's § 12 immunity from tort liability should continue to stand where it has stood for nearly a centuryat the willful tort line. [8] The court today reduces the outer limit of immunity to coincide with the reach of the so-called foreign doctrine of substantial certainty. [9] The latter shrinks an employer's immunity by adding liability for the torts of gross negligence and reckless indifference. This doctrine is neither in harmony with Oklahoma's historical antecedents nor with its constitutional jurisprudence which gave birth to workers' compensation liability. [10] ¶ 5 The 1915 workers' compensation law abolished the employee's common-law negligence action against the employer and the latter's corollary defenses of contributory negligence and assumption of the risk. [11] In conformity with this tradeoff, workers obtained the benefit of employers' fault-free liability for on-the-job-injuries and employers received protection from answerability in tort. [12] In an early attack on the Act's constitutional validity, the court in Adams v. Iten Biscuit Co . [13] upheld the compensation law's exclusive remedy for work-related accidental injuries. Iten teaches that willful and intentional injuries, whether inflicted by the employer or employee, are not to be considered accidental and hence must be excluded from coverage. As a result of this early twentieth-century tradeoff, the obligations that the workers' compensation regime imposes on employers are absolutely inseparable from the perimeter of immunity that compensation law confers. [14] ¶ 6 Torts of gross negligence that are based on reckless indifference to the safety of an individual authorize the defense of contributory negligence, but fall short of an intentional wrong's equivalent. [15] I would leave the immunity line where it should be and where it has stood correctly placedat the demarcation that separates torts in which contributory negligence is a defense from torts in which contributory negligence is not a defense. An employer would enjoy § 12 immunity if the tort is in the subclass of those to which contributory negligence may be interposed as a defense. [16] Where the law would not permit a defense of contributory negligence, the immunity would not avail because the harm could not be deemed accidental. [17]