Court Opinion

ID: 9848876
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 04:29:11.781649+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:18:51.633360
License: Public Domain

BLATZ, Chief Justice
(concurring).
While I agree with the reasoning and conclusion of the majority opinion, I write separately to underscore my concern regarding respondents’ request to have a public policy requirement read into the whistleblower statute. The respondents contend that a public policy requirement is needed because, without one, an employee’s “mere internal dispute over matters of office and personnel management can easily be recast as a [whistleblower] claim,” forcing courts into the role of “super-personnel departments.” That, indeed, is a risk that may loom on the horizon. But standing in its shadows is a risk that I believe could present even greater challenges to the judiciary — and that is the risk of being saddled with the ultimate responsibility for determining what employers’ decisions contravene “a clear mandate of public policy.” See Phipps v. Clark Oil & Ref. Corp., 396 N.W.2d 588, 592 (Minn.App.1986), aff'd, 408 N.W.2d 569 (Minn.1987).
*278In their argument that a public policy requirement is embodied in the whistle-blower statute, the respondents suggest that it is “naive” to conclude that “all laws and regulations” should create whistle-blower liability. For this proposition, the respondents rely on, and liberally quote from, an article cited by the court of appeals in a special concurrence. See Bertagnoli v. Carlson Mktg. Group, Inc., No. C6-98-541, 1998 WL 665085, at *5 (Minn.App. Sept. 18, 1998) (Short, J., concurring specially) (citing James H. Raster, Putting “Public Policy” Back into Minnesota’s Whistleblower Statute, Hennepin Law., June 1998, at 4-5). When discussing the “whistle-blower dilemma,” the author of the article, James Raster, notes that “[l]aws and regulations are passed for less-than-noble reasons all the time. Sometimes it is difficult to see the health, safety, and welfare reasons behind certain pork-barrel legislation.” Raster, at 7. Building upon this observation, respondents embrace a public policy requirement and assert that “it is not difficult to distinguish between situations which involve only the private * * * interests of the employer-employee relationship and those situations involving the direct interests of the general public — i.e., matters dealing with public morals, health, safety and welfare.”
The respondents’ confidence that such lines of demarcation can be so easily drawn minimizes the difficulty of the responsibility they are urging upon the courts. Recognizing that much legislation is hotly contested, are the courts to sit as a “super legislature” to pass muster on the worthiness of a law? And in divining what laws in fact do not embody public policy, will the courts become an unwitting partner with a minority of legislators who were unsuccessful in their attempts to block a bill’s passage? These concerns — in conjunction with an appreciation that what one court may view as “pork” may be gruel in the eyes of legislators working on behalf of their constituents — give me great pause. While we will defer to the legislature’s wisdom in deciding how expansive or narrow it wishes to make the whistle-blower statute, flares must be lit to mark the perilous road that the courts will have to maneuver if a public policy provision is adopted. It is for this reason that I write separately.