Court Opinion

ID: 9542339
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 16:33:16.127211+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:07:44.618016
License: Public Domain

O’HERN, J.,
dissenting.
This appeal should result in a new trial. Simply put, the trial court improperly charged this jury, which returned a multi-million dollar verdict, concerning an essential element of a CEPA claim. (CEPA is the acronym for the Conscientious Employee Protection Act, N.J.S.A 34:19-1 to -8, often referred to as the Whistle Blower Law.)
I
In New Jersey, an employer may terminate an employee for no reason, no good reason, or even for a morally wrong reason, unless the employee has an employment contract providing for termination only for cause or if the discharge is contrary to a clear mandate of public policy. Woolley v. Hoffmann-La Roche, Inc., 99 N.J. 284, 290-91, 491 A.2d 1257 (discussing Pierce v. Ortho Pharm. Corp., 84 N.J. 58, 72, 417 A.2d 505 (1980)), modified, 101 N.J. 10, 499 A.2d 515 (1985). According to CEPA, an employer may not terminate an employee for complaining about activities of the employer that offend a clear mandate of public policy. N.J.S.A 34:19-3c(3). The majority correctly recognizes that the identification of a clear mandate of public policy that invokes protection under CEPA is strictly a judicial function. Ante at 187-88, 707 A.2d at 1012-13.
I can agree that an employee need not be certain that the employer’s conduct is, in fact, illegal or in contravention of a clear mandate of public policy. See Abbamont v. Piscataway Tp. Bd. of Educ., 138 N.J. 405, 650 A.2d 958 (1994) (holding that teacher need not know exact content of regulation governing ventilation in *198metal shop in order to state claim). The employee must only have a reasonable belief that there is such a policy and that the employer’s conduct violated the policy. Before a cause of action is stated, however, the court must find that such a policy actually exists.
Plaintiff identified a number of policies that he believed established the clear mandate of public policy. Among them were (1) Article 1(3) of the Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation between the United States and Japan; (2) an agreement of the Japanese Petroleum Association banning the sale of gasoline with five percent or greater benzene levels; (3) a requirement of the Japanese Environmental Agency requiring that drinking water in Japan have no more than .01 mg/liter of benzene; (4) a regulation of the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission requiring products with five percent or more benzene to be labelled “poison” (defendant has pointed out that this regulation excluded gasoline from its coverage); (5) a Mobil memorandum concerning a regulation of the United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration concerning maximum exposure levels to benzene in the workplace; (6) a provision of the Ethical Code of the American Society of Toxicology concerning the communication of information concerning “health safety and toxicity”; (7) a scientific paper concerning the carcinogenicity of benzene; (8) the “Mobil Oil Corporation’s Policy on Product Safety Stewardship”; and (9) an interoffice memorandum of Mobil stating that benzene had been considered toxic for years, particularly among rubber workers.
The trial court did not identify for the jury any of these as estabhshing a clear mandate of public policy. In effect, the court provided the jury with a laundry list of possible sources of public policy and permitted the jury to pick one for itself. (Paradoxically, the trial court that heard all of the evidence found that none established a clear mandate of public policy applicable to Mobil’s conduct in Japan.) It is therefore simply impossible to have any *199confidence that an unguided jury has correctly performed the function assigned to it.
II
On a deeper level, the Court has mixed the issue of whether an employee reasonably believed that the employer’s conduct contravenes a clear mandate of public policy with the question of whether there was in fact a clear mandate of public policy that made the conduct complained of illegal or unethical at the time of the employee’s complaint.
A.
When the Legislature adopted CEPA in 1986, it essentially “codified this Court’s ruling in Pierce [ ], which protected employees against discharges that violated a clear mandate of public policy. The purpose of CEPA is to protect employees who report illegal or unethical work-place activities.” Barratt v. Cushman & Wakefield, 144 N.J. 120, 126-27, 675 A.2d 1094 (1996) (discussing Pierce, supra, 84 N.J. at 72, 417 A.2d 505). The Court recognized that CEPA balances the right of a business person to run a business with the right of an employee to speak on important policy issues without fear of reprisal. The Court identified several sources of public policy.
Out of respect for the employer’s interest, employees can bring wrongful discharge claims only if they can identify an expression that equates with a clear mandate of public policy and if they can show that they were discharged in violation of that public policy. Sources of public policy include the United States and New Jersey Constitutions; federal and state laws and administrative rules, regulations, and decisions; the common law and specific judicial decisions; and in certain cases, professional codes of ethics:
[MacDougall v. Weichert, 144 N.J. 380, 391, 677 A.2d 162 (1996).]
The linchpin “of the wrongful discharge cause of action is that the mandate of public policy be clearly identified and firmly grounded.” Ibid. “A vague, controversial, unsettled, and otherwise problematic public policy does not constitute a clear mandate. *200Its alleged violation will not sustain a wrongful discharge cause of action.” Id. at 392, 677 A.2d 162.
B.
What was the illegal conduct complained of by the employee— the sale in Japan of gasoline with benzene levels in excess of five percent — and what public policy made that illegal? To establish a clear mandate of public policy, the majority relies principally upon the agreement of the Japanese Petroleum Association, a private industry association. The majority reasons that the policies of this private body are elevated to public policy because Mobil agreed to be bound by the Association’s policies. Ante at 192-93, 707 A.2d at 1015. That Mobil agreed to abide by the policies of the Japanese Petroleum Association may establish company policy, but it surely does not establish the public policy of the United States, the State of New Jersey, or the government of Japan. (Besides, I am not so sure that I would wish the Mobil Oil Corporation to be establishing the public policy of this country and I suspect that a Japanese policy-maker might feel the same way.) A clear mandate of public policy has the effect of law and will be plainly perceived as such. In his dissent in MacDougall, supra, our former Chief Justice Wilentz explained that clear mandates of public policy “are general rules” to be “applied uniformly.” 144 N.J. at 426, 677 A.2d 162.
If it is the Court’s decision to require a multinational corporation to conform its conduct overseas to the “general rules” imposed by the Court, the ruling poses practical constraints on multinational companies headquartered in New Jersey. Without presuming any familiarity with the specifics, I note that at one time France experimented with the use of ethanol-based fuels containing a benzene content of ten percent. National Corn Growers Ass’n v. Baker, 636 F.Supp. 921, 930 n. 17 (Ct. Int’l Trade 1986), rev’d, 840 F.2d 1547 (Fed.Cir.1988). If a New Jersey court were to determine that selling a gasoline product overseas with a benzene content in excess of five percent is against domes*201tic public policy, the New Jersey-based company would not be able to compete in the French market. In effect, New Jersey courts would be exporting their views on how to do business abroad. Congress is free to regulate the overseas activities of domestic companies. See D’Agostino v. Johnson & Johnson, Inc., 133 N.J. 516, 534, 628 A.2d 305 (1993). I doubt that we are or should.
Determining acceptable levels of benzene in gasoline has been an evolving process. Benzene is naturally found in petroleum. In this country, until the early 1990s, gasoline was sold with benzene levels of up to five percent. Bly v. Tri-Continental Indus., 663 A.2d 1232, 1244 n. 9 (D.C.1995). Responding to growing scientific awareness that benzene posed a threat of carcinogenicity, the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments made major strides in the reduction of benzene levels in American gasoline. 42 U.S.C.A. § 7545(k)(2)(C). It may be a bit of hindsight now for the Court to emphasize the one-percent limit on benzene in domestic gasoline as evidence that there was in 1989 an equally clear mandate of public policy applicable to Mobil in Japan that forbade the sale of gasoline with five percent or more of benzene. The best that can be said is that there was in 1989 an emerging public policy that because of health risks the benzene content of gasoline be reduced. Contrast this with D’Agostino where we identified a clear mandate of public policy warranting the extraterritorial application of our common-law employment law. There we found that Congress clearly intended the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) to reflect a federal policy of preventing “the bribing of foreign officials by domestic companies.” D’Agostino, supra, 133 N.J. at 532, 628 A.2d 305. We equated that federal policy to a state policy “especially when a violation ... has an impact on the health and welfare of the state forum.” Ibid. We concluded that our domestic employment law can “apply extraterritorially only when the underlying clear mandate of public policy is intended to have an extraterritorial effect.” Id. at 534, 628 A.2d 305.
This is not to say that Doctor Mehlman was not an idealistic man or that what he was doing was not right. The point is that, *202just like Doctor Pierce, he disagreed with the conduct of an employer that was not clearly proscribed by then existent public policy. See Pierce, supra, 84 N.J. at 72, 417 A.2d 505 (“Research on new drugs may involve questions of safety, but courts should not preempt determination of debatable questions unless the research involves a violation of a clear mandate of public policy.”). Moreover, his conduct reflected no clear perception that law was being violated. His offhand, spontaneous remarks, ante at 169-70, 707 A.2d at 1003, were far short of the forcefiil and repeated refusals in Abbamont, supra, concerning violations of safety requirements. 138 N.J. at 410-13, 650 A.2d 958.
Observers perceive that the Court’s holding will establish the principle that a scientist should not suffer retaliation on account of expressing scientific views that depart from company policy. One wrote: “It’s a whistle-blower case. If the guy is a scientist and his figures are correct, he should be able to say what he said. I don’t feel he should have been stifled.” Franklin Hoke, Whistle Blower’s Legal Victory Seen As Supporting Industry Scientists Who Criticize Their Employers, The Scientist, Aug. 22, 1994, at 1, 6.1 This would surely be the case in an ideal world, but the question that the Court must decide is whether these are the employment guarantees that CEPA has created.
I have a sense that this case is idiosyncratic and will not create an unmoored cause of action providing relief for every employee’s intra-company dispute over policy.2 Because Mobil raised defens*203es that the jury found to be pretextual, this case never focused on the core issue of whether in 1989 a clear mandate of public policy of the United States, the government of Japan, or the State of New Jersey forbade the sale in Japan of gasoline with a benzene content in excess of five percent. Mobil defended Dr. Mehlman’s claim on the basis that Mobil had fired Mehlman because he had misused company property to advance his wife’s business interests and on the basis that it had never marketed gasoline with a benzene content in excess of five percent. These two defenses were doomed to failure by the facts. In Velantzas v. Colgate-Palmolive Co., we forecast the result of the use of “euphemisms” by personnel managers. 109 N.J. 189, 194 n. 2, 536 A.2d 237 (1988) (“[Fjailing candidly to state the reasons for a discharge may cloud the factfinding process.”). The question is whether we should now close our minds to the fact that the case was incorrectly tried (the trial court did not identify for the jury the clear mandate of public policy) and the fact that plaintiff did not *204establish a clear mandate of public policy in existence in 1989 that proscribed the employer’s conduct.
I would not foreclose the possibility that a clear mandate of public policy may have existed in 1989 that made illegal or unethical, the employer’s conduct. In my view, the Court has not yet identified one. In MacDougall, supra, we allowed that possibility (that a clear mandate of public policy might be developed) to occur on a remand. 144 N.J. at 405, 677 A.2d 162. I would grant a new trial on the basis of the error in this case and allow such an attempt.
Justice HANDLER joins in this opinion.
For affirmance — Chief Justice PQRITZ and Justices POLLOCK, STEIN and COLEMAN — 4.
Dissenting — Justices HANDLER and O’HERN — 2.

 In the popularization of events, Dr. Mehlman has been compared to figures such as Karen Silkwood, Frank Seipico, and even to the marshal played by Gary Cooper in the movie "High Noon." Thomas W. Durso, Fired Whistleblower's Successful Appeal May Broaden State Protection Statutes, The Scientist, Sept. 2, 1996, at 1, 9. In life, it is not always so easy to see the white hats as it is in cinema.

 In MacDougall, supra, the Court listed the cases to that effect:
DeVries v. McNeil Consumer Prods. Co., 250 N.J.Super. 159, 172, 593 A.2d 819 (App.Div.1991) (holding that discharge of employee for having distribuí*203ed "expired" drugs at employer's direction did not violate clear mandate of public policy because the discharge "implicated only the private interests of the parties”); Schwartz v. Leasametric, Inc., 224 N.J.Super. 21, 30, 539 A.2d 744 (App.Div. 1988) (holding that discharge of employee to avoid paying commissions on future transactions did not violate clear mandate of public policy); Giudice v. Drew Chem. Corp., 210 N.J.Super. 32, 36, 509 A.2d 200 (App.Div.) ("Private investigation of possible criminal activities of fellow employees does not implicate the same public policy consideration as if plaintiffs had been fired as a result of cooperating with law enforcement officials investigating possible criminal activities of fellow employees.”), certif. denied, 104 N.J. 465, 517 A.2d 449 (1986); Alexander v. Kay Finlay Jewelers, Inc., 208 N.J.Super. 503, 508, 506 A.2d 379 (App.Div.) (determining that discharge of employee who filed civil suit against employer to collect allegedly unpaid salary did not violate clear mandate of public policy because there is "no statutory or regulatory proscription against [the] firing”), certif. denied, 104 N.J. 466, 517 A.2d 449 (1986); Warthen v. Toms River Community Memorial Hosp., 199 N.J.Super. 18, 28, 488 A.2d 229 (App.Div.) (ruling that discharge of nurse for refusing to administer kidney dialysis to terminally ill patient did not violate clear mandate of public policy where employee was motivated by "her own personal morals”), certif. denied, 101 N.J. 255, 501 A.2d 926 (1985).
[144 N.J. at 392-93, 677 A.2d 162.]