Court Opinion

ID: 9710278
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 04:05:44.768707+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:22:55.538830
License: Public Domain

LaVECCHIA, J.,
concurring.
I am able to join in the judgment of the Court and its narrow holding that applies the “required-vehicle” exception to the “going- and-coming” rule and imposes liability on this employer under a respondeat superior theory. Importantly, the Court eschews any reliance on “the broad enterprise liability theory that is the standard for respondeat superior in California.” Ante at 418, *420815 A.2d at 469; see also O’Toole v. Carr, 175 N.J. 421, 815 A.2d 471 (2003). The Court wisely declines to adopt a standard that effectively abandons consideration of employer control in the context of employee automobile accidents.
I have no hesitation in agreeing with the Court’s assessment here that the employer exercised control and derived benefit from requiring its employee to have her motor vehicle at work that day and sending her, in that vehicle, to an alternate site to perform duties. Her employer thus must bear vicarious liability for the accident that occurred on her way home from that assignment. This was not the employee’s typical end-of-workday commute home from her regular worksite; it was a return home from assigned off-site work duties. In that setting, the cessation of workday duties did not signal the end of the employer’s control and derived benefit from the condition of employment that required the use of her vehicle in promotion of the employer’s interest.
That said, fairly read, the Court’s opinion does not stand for the proposition that every invocation of the required-vehicle exception shall subject an employer to liability for an automobile accident occurring during an employee’s commutation. It surely has not been, and is not as a result of this decision, the law of this Court that all types of employees who commute to work by personal vehicle, and who may be sent, via their own vehicle, on assignment from time to time, now commute every day to and from their regular workplace “under the control” of their employer. The Court has never considered such a broadly sweeping application of the required-vehicle exception to the going-and-coming rule. The societal cost and benefit of such an across-the-board application of the required-vehicle exception to all employees who may have to commute to work by their own motor vehicle and who may have to use their vehicle occasionally in work-related business would require careful scrutiny,' but not today and not on these facts. Because that question is left for another day, I am able to join in the Court’s disposition.
*421For affirmance — Chief Justice PORITZ and Justices COLEMAN, LONG, VERNIERO, LaVECCHIA, ZAZZALI and ALBIN — 7.
Opposed — None.