Opinion ID: 1391747
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: State Employee Liability [9]

Text: This leaves us with a misty and hazy area yet to be clarified and defined-namely, what to do with the question which asks whether or not, and under what circumstances, the State's employees are or are not immune from tort liability. We paid glancing recognition to this fuzzy area of law when, in Retail Clerks Local 187 v. University of Wyoming, Wyo., 531 P.2d 884 (1975) (having held that suit against the state university administrative officials and board members in their official capacity was a suit against the State), we said that the immunity question in a suit against these board and administrative officials individually was not so clear. We quoted the United States Supreme Court, where the Court said: `As to what is deemed a suit against a state, the early suggestion that the inhibition might be confined to those in which the state was a party to the record [citations] has long since been abandoned, and it is now established that the question is to be determined not by the mere names of the titular parties but by the essential nature and effect of the proceeding, as it appears from the entire record [citations].' In re State of New York, 256 U.S. 490, 500, 41 S.Ct. 588, 590, 65 L.Ed. 1057. We also cited Anderson v. Argraves, 146 Conn. 316, 150 A.2d 295, 297; and Stucker v. Muscatine, 249 Iowa 485, 87 N.W.2d 452, 456. We then quoted the following from Schwing v. Miles, 367 Ill. 436, 11 N.E.2d 944, 947 (1937), 113 A.L.R. 1504: `   While a suit against state officials, and, in particular, the Director of the Department of Public Works and Buildings, is not necessarily a suit against the state, the constitutional inhibition cannot be evaded by making an action nominally one against the servants or agents of the state when the real claim is against the state itself, and it is the party vitally interested.   ' 531 P.2d at 887. At common law, the principal and agent are both liable for their tortious acts-the agent because he or she is the wrongdoer-the principal because of wrongdoing or by dint of the doctrine of respondeat superior. In the realm of state torts, respondeat superior is not the exception to immunity but, rather, is inherently rejected by it. [10] Even so, in certain instances, such as some of those hereinafter discussed or where immunity has been abrogated (as in Wyoming with governmental entities other than the State itself, Oroz, supra), the public employee may be liable for wrongdoing.