Opinion ID: 895233
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Lopez and Zeltwanger

Text: Our decision is consistent with, though not compelled by, two of our recent decisions. In City of Waco v. Lopez , [50] we held that an employee claiming he was terminated in retaliation for complaining of age and race discrimination could not bring a claim under the Whistleblower Act. [51] Instead, we held the TCHRA was his exclusive remedy because it provided a more specific and tailored remedy. [52] To hold otherwise, we reasoned, would allow a plaintiff to skirt the TCHRA's detailed substantive and procedural provisions. As in Lopez, Williams' common-law claim falls squarely within the CHRA's ambit, [53] that Act implements a comprehensive administrative regime, and affords carefully constructed remedies, [54] and allowing the alternative remedy would render the limitations in the CHRA utterly meaningless [55] and defeat the CHRA's comprehensive statutory scheme. [56] As with permitting a Whistleblower Act claim, permitting a common-law claim for negligent supervision and retention would allow plaintiffs to pick and choose among irreconcilable and inconsistent regimes, [57] one specific and one more general, the result being that employees would have little incentive to submit to the administrative process the Legislature considered necessary to help remedy discrimination in the workplace. Such a result would frustrate clear legislative intent. [58] While Lopez considered whether another statutory remedy would thwart the TCHRA, similar concerns exist if a plaintiff is permitted to pursue a common-law remedy in lieu of the Legislature's tailored and balanced statutory scheme. In Hoffmann-La Roche Inc. v. Zeltwanger , we held that a common-law claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress was not available to an employee complaining of sexual harassment by a supervisor. [59] We held that if the gravamen of the plaintiff's complaint is for sexual harassment, the plaintiff must proceed solely under a statutory claim unless there are additional facts, unrelated to sexual harassment, to support an independent tort claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress. [60] We concluded that the plaintiff's common-law tort claim was not independent of her sexual harassment claim, [61] and that [b]ecause the CHRA provides a remedy for the same emotional damages caused by essentially the same actions, there is no remedial gap in this case and thus no support for the award of damages under the intentional-infliction claim. [62] Zeltwanger is consistent with our decision today. Williams' common-law claim is not unrelated to or independent of her statutory claim; they are both based on the same course of conduct. The unwanted sexual touching that underlies her negligence claim was assaultive because Williams regarded it as sexually inappropriate, provocative, and offensivethat is, because it amounted to sexual harassment made unlawful by the TCHRA. Zeltwanger recognized that the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress was judicially created as a gap-filler tort to provide a remedy where other traditional remedies are not available. [63] However, essential reasoning of Zeltwanger is equally applicable here. The Court was unwilling to allow a duplicative common-law tort recovery because it would undermine the limitations placed on the legislative remedy directed at the same conduct: [T]he tort should not be extended to thwart legislative limitations on statutory claims for mental anguish and punitive damages. By combining her sexual harassment claim with the intentional-infliction tort, Zeltwanger has circumvented, by more than thirty-fold, the legislative determination of the maximum amount that a defendant should pay for this type of conduct. In creating the new tort, we never intended that it be used to evade legislatively-imposed limitations on statutory claims.... If the gravamen of a plaintiff's complaint is the type of wrong that the statutory remedy was meant to cover, a plaintiff cannot maintain an intentional infliction claim regardless of whether he or she succeeds on, or even makes, a statutory claim. [64] This reasoning supports today's decision. The gravamen of Williams' complaint is sexual discrimination in the form of a hostile or abusive work environment, a wrong the TCHRA was specifically designed to remedy. Whether viewed from the standpoint of Davis' motivations or his conduct's effect on Williams, the behavior was injurious because it was sexual harassment. Lopez and Zeltwanger do not mandate today's result, but their essential teachings are entirely consistent with it.