Opinion ID: 1433952
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The meaning of employee

Text: In his complaint, Doe alleges that the Holy See employed priests, including one Father Andrew Ronan and that Ronan was under the direct supervision and control of the Holy See. The Holy See was further responsible for the work and discipline [of] ... priests. According to the complaint, the Holy See on at least one occasion was responsible for controlling where Ronan performed his functions: the Holy See placed Ronan in [the] Archdiocese at St. Albert's Church in Portland, Oregon. The Holy See maintains that Doe has not alleged sufficient facts to demonstrate that Ronan was an employee of the Holy See for purposes of the tortious act exception, because the word employee is a legal conclusion we are not required to accept as true. We are highly skeptical of the notion that, under notice pleading, use of the word employee in a complaint is insufficient to establish an allegation of an employment relationship. True, in addition to being a word used in everyday speech, employee does have a common law legal definition. See, e.g., Schaff v. Ray's Land & Sea Food Co., 334 Or. 94, 45 P.3d 936, 939 (2002) (defining employee for purposes of Oregon law). But then, of course, so do the words person, corporation, citizen, and molest, also used in this complaint  and, undoubtedly, in many other complaints filed each year in federal courts  without further definition. Were we to require that every such word used in a complaint be broken down into its constituent factual predicates, we would undermine the purpose of notice pleading  that is, to focus litigation on the merits of a claim rather than on procedural requirements. Galbraith v. County of Santa Clara, 307 F.3d 1119, 1125 (9th Cir.2002). Thus, while we do not accept Doe's legal conclusions as true, we also do not engage in a hypertechnical reading of the complaint inconsistent with the generous notice pleading standard. Mendoza v. Zirkle Fruit Co., 301 F.3d 1163, 1168 (9th Cir.2002). Although there is undoubtedly a line beyond which the legal definition of a commonly used term is so complex or contentious that failure to allege each element of the definition would prevent a defendant from understanding the factual basis for the claim, use of the word employee falls well short of that line.