Court Opinion

ID: 9700564
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 21:35:43.941456+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:21:11.364246
License: Public Domain

LEVINE, Justice,
specially concurring.
I join in the majority opinion, while registering but one small difference. I am not prepared to say in this case, that sex discrimination in obtaining employment or a promotion, without more, may not constitute sufficiently outrageous conduct to raise a jury question. With that difference noted, I concur in the rest of the opinion authored by former Chief Justice Erick-stad.
Discrimination “deprives persons of their individual dignity....” Roberts v. United States Jaycees, 468 U.S. 609, 625, 104 S.Ct. 3244, 3258, 82 L.Ed.2d 462 (1984). Sex discrimination is based on “archaic and overbroad assumptions” about the needs and capacities of women, stereotypical notions that “often bear no relationship to [a person’s] actual abilities.” Id. 468 U.S. at 625, 104 S.Ct. at 3253. There are countless examples of the exclusion of women from all walks of life because of the biased view that women are less able than men. Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan, 458 U.S. 718, 725 n. 10, 102 S.Ct. 3331, 3336 n. 10, 73 L.Ed.2d 1090 (1982). One strikes close to home.
Myra Bradwell could not practice law.1 Bradwell v. Illinois, 16 Wall 130, 21 L.Ed. *188442 (1873). It may be that no reasonable jury in 1873 would have found Bradwell’s exclusion outrageous. But, surely, the same cannot be said about juries in 1993. Fortunately, former custom does not prevent present practice from constituting extreme and outrageous conduct. See Alcorn v. Anbro Engineering, Inc., 2 Cal.3d 493, 86 Cal.Rptr. 88, 91 n. 4, 468 P.2d 216, 219 n. 4 (1970) [racial epithets by one in position of authority states a claim for relief for the intentional infliction of emotional distress].
The outrageous conduct necessary to prove the intentional infliction of emotional distress is conduct that is so extreme in degree “as to go beyond all bounds of decency and to be regarded as atrocious, and utterly intolerable in a civilized community.” Restatement (Second) of Torts § 46 comment d (1965). The conduct must be, to use the vernacular, “really gross.” It must substantially offend community notions of acceptable conduct. Grandchamp v. United Air Lines, 854 F.2d 381 (10th Cir.1988).
Is sex discrimination fairly regarded as “atrocious and utterly intolerable in a civilized community”? The answer must derive not alone from the act of sex discrimination but from the impact of that act on its victim. Sex discrimination debases, devalues and despoils. When we cannot do anything to overcome another’s criticism, hatred or contempt, we are, in effect, struck twice: first, by the act and, second and equally devastating, by the realization that we are helpless to undo that act, overcome it or change it. This is particularly true in a workplace. See Robinson v. Jacksonville Shipyards, Inc., 760 F.Supp. 1486, 1505-07 (M.D.Fla.1991). As the majority points out, sex discrimination in the workplace constitutes an abuse of power by one in a superior position over one who is vulnerable and powerless. As children, we learned that lightning does not strike twice. As adults, we must conclude that discrimination surely does. An employee, like Swenson, who is eliminated solely because of her sex is laid low, first by the irrational, discriminatory conduct and then, by the inability to do anything about it. Indeed, victims, like Swenson, often need reassurance that it is not their fault that employers have discriminated against them. See Susan Martin, Sexual Harassment: The Link Joining Gender Stratification, Sexuality and Women’s Economic Status, in Women: A Feminist Perspective 57, 62 (Jo Freeman ed., 4th ed. 1989). Discrimination is not a tale of hurt feelings, unkind behavior or inconsiderate conduct by one against another. Compare Muchow v. Lindblad, 435 N.W.2d 918 (N.D.1989). That it may insult is irrelevant; that it strips its victim of self-esteem, self-confidence and self-realization is the nub of its evil and the stuff of its outrageousness. As a subscriber to Oliver Wendell Holmes’ belief that experience (not logic) fuels the engine of the law, and as a member of a class that has been subjected to discrimination, I find it difficult to understand how, at least, some members of the jury, whom we would all agree were reasonable members of their community, would not agree that sex discrimination, like race discrimination, goes beyond all bounds of decency and is truly atrocious and utterly intolerable in a civilized community. Compare Wendy Pollack, Sexual Harassment: Women’s Experience vs. Legal Definitions, 13 Harvard Women’s L.J. 35, 53 (Sp.1990) [legal concept of reasonable “man” standard or gender-neutral standard does not work in sexual harassment cases because it fails to recognize “male dominance” within “the larger phenomenon of gender hierarchy.”].
And it is the jury that determines whether the challenged conduct is outrageous. E.g., Dreith v. National Football League, 777 F.Supp. 832 (D.Colo.1991). The court only decides the preliminary issue whether reasonable persons could differ on whether the conduct is outrageous. Id. It seems to me that if reasonable judges can disagree on whether or not sex discrimination is *189outrageous, then reasonable jurors can, too. They should be given the opportunity to consider the question and plaintiff should be given the opportunity to educate, persuade and convince the jury in this case, that the alleged sex discrimination has no place in our society and is outrageous, extreme and wholly intolerable. The jury can take into account our changing social mores, the development of civil-rights law, and plaintiff’s susceptibility as a member of a vulnerable class which has been historically discriminated against, to decide whether the conduct, that is, the sex discrimination, directed at plaintiff, constitutes the outrageous conduct necessary for plaintiff to prevail. See Contreras v. Crown Zellerbach Corp., 88 Wash.2d 735, 565 P.2d 1173 (1977). Only then will there be a fair resolution of the question of whether defendant’s conduct substantially offends the community’s notions of acceptable conduct. And that answer will be better provided by the representatives of the parties’ community, the jurors, who likely have a keener aptness for judging their community’s mores than either the trial court or this court.
The Supreme Court held in Bradwell that a statute describing “persons” who could practice law excluded females. That interpretation, however, must be; viewed in the context of the legal culture of the time with its cabal of customary beliefs and complex of tradition about women and their separate sphere. The exclusion of women rested on the belief that men, simply because they were men, belonged in the public sphere rife with power and status, and women, in the private sphere — the home. See generally, Debra L. Rhode; The “No-Problem” Problem: Feminist Challenges and Cultural Change, 100 Yale L.J. 1731 (1991) [describing nineteenth-century-separate-spheres ideology]. Myra Bradwell could not practice law because of that prevailing view, espoused by Justice Bradley in his concurring opinion, that women.did not have the “special skill and confidence” required of lawyers, because of women’s “peculiar characteristics, destiny, and mis-sion_” Bradwell, supra at 16 Wall 142. Fortunately, that stereotypical notion of women’s “proper place” was abandoned and women in increasing numbers now engage in the practice of law. Inaugurating this State’s tradition, Helen Hamilton, the first woman graduate of the University of North Dakota School of Law, was described in information published in honor of her graduating class of 1905:
“She with all the charm of woman, She with all the breadth of man.”
See U.N.D. Law Women’s Caucus Pamphlet, Eleventh Annual Helen Hamilton Day, Mar. 4, 1993.
Today, if Helen Hamilton, charm and breadth notwithstanding, were unable to get a position because of sex discrimination, she would at least have the opportunity to right that wrong by having her day in court. She should be able to get to the jury with evidence of sex discrimination, defendant’s intent or reckless disregard and her severe emotional distress and she should be able to prevail if she establishes those three elements of the tort by a preponderance of the evidence. To do that, she will have to have successfully eliminated from the jury those folks who just don’t get it. It may well be that stereotypes about the “proper place” of women and their need for special treatment, like old soldiers, have not died. The jury can tell us if they have faded away.

. Ms. Bradwell had lots of company. Her sister-in-arms, Lavinia Goodell, met the same fate in Wisconsin in 1876. The Application of Miss iMvinia Goodell, 39 Wis. 232 (1876). Goodell’s case commands special attention as a paradigm of conventional thinking about women. Chief Justice Ryan, in a unanimous opinion for himself and the two justices who then comprised the Wisconsin Supreme Court, denied Goodell’s application squarely on the basis of her sex. He explained, in excruciating detail, the common law tradition of excluding women from the profession of law, because:
“The law of nature destines and qualifies the female sex for the bearing and nurture of the children of our race and for the custody of the homes of the world and their maintenance in love and honor. And all life-long callings of women, inconsistent with these radical and sacred duties of their sex, as is the profession of the law, are departures from the order of nature; and when voluntary, treason against it_”
As for lawyerly skills, women were found sorely deficient:
"There are many employments in life not unfit for female character. The profession of the law is surely not one of these. The peculiar qualities of womanhood, its gentle graces, its quick sensibility, its tender susceptibility, its purity, its delicacy, its emotional impulses, its subordination of hard reason to sympathetic feeling are surely not qualifications for forensic strife. Nature has tempered woman as little for the juridical conflicts of the court room, as for the physical conflicts of the battle field. Womanhood is moulded for gentler and better things_”
One might ask, but I won’t, whether women’s record of accomplishments in "the juridical conflicts of the court room" does not pierce Chief Justice Ryan and the common law's view, shared by a few others, that women are not qualified for the battlefield. Actually, given Chief Justice Ryan’s sentiment that the practice of law is filled with "all that is selfish and malicious, knavish and criminal, coarse and brutal, repulsive and obscene ...,” it is small wonder anyone would willingly undertake it!
*188Over three years later, Goodell reapplied for admission to practice before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Application of Goodell, 48 Wis. 693, 81 N.W. 551 (1879). The Court, enlarged to five members, granted her application. Chief Justice Ryan dissented!