Opinion ID: 1360487
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Overruling D'Angelo

Text: Two years ago we decided to consolidate two wrongful discharge cases, D'Angelo v. Gardner and Western States Minerals Corp. v. Jones, 107 Nev. 704, 819 P.2d 206 (1991). In these opinions, the members of this court engaged for some fifty-eight pages in a debate on the meaning of at-will as the term relates to relatively long-term employees who lay claim, by reason of their tenure and their past dealings with their employers, to something more than an at-will job in which their employers are permitted to cast them off without any particular reasons for doing so, after long years of faithful service. A majority of this court held that Mr. D'Angelo, a twelve-year employee, had made out a triable jury case that he was not, at the time that his employer dismissed him, an at-will employee and that his employer had, during the employment period, assumed an obligation of continued employment which protected D'Angelo against whimsical at-will dismissal. Id. at 711, 819 P.2d at 211. D'Angelo stands for the proposition that even in the absence of an express contract of continued employment, an at-will employment may grow into an employment relationship in which an employer has a contractual obligation not to discharge the employee without first abiding by the conditions relating to dismissal which are ... inferable from the dealings and practices of the parties. Id. at 709, 819 P.2d at 209 (emphasis added). Despite the kind of urgent protestations that were set forth by two of the justices in the D'Angelo dissent, the law in this state has, for the past ten years [2] and until today, remained constant: Even though employment relationships are presumed to be at-will, a contractual relationship as to tenure may be inferred from the dealings and practices of the parties, and an employee is entitled to present evidence that the parties decided to forego `at-will' status and enter into a contract relative to employment termination. Id. at 708 n. 3, 819 P.2d at 209 n. 3. I would be much more tolerant of the Majority's abrupt change of position in employment law if it had acted in accordance with accepted judicial process and had expressly overruled the employee-rights jurisprudence of the past. As things now stand, no one really knows what our employment law stands for or what it means. I am saddened that such a radical change in our law must come about only two years after D'Angelo merely because one of our justices, Justice Rose, has joined the position of the two dissenting justices in D'Angelo. We are back again on the at-will see-saw.