Court Opinion

ID: 9644088
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 20:47:55.384519+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:05:18.964731
License: Public Domain

DOGGETT, Justice,
concurring.
Diana Casas is outraged that she was fired as the Director of Human Resources for Wornick Co., despite a series of excellent job evaluations, the last of which came *738shortly before her dismissal and described her as “one of [the] company’s best resources.” Under Texas law, much more is required to establish a cause of action. The employment-at-will doctrine permitting an employee to be fired for some reason or no reason is well established. See East Line & R.R.R. Co. v. Scott, 72 Tex. 70, 10 S.W. 99 (1888). An employee cannot circumvent that doctrine by simply claiming that a lawful dismissal was emotionally stressful. Undoubtedly, most terminations are upsetting.
In the course of a separate “assault on the right to privacy in Texas,” the majority has, however, sought to reach out far beyond any reasonable protection of the employment-at-will doctrine with a
restrictive interpretation of “outrageous,” [so that] even an employer’s admission to having falsely advertised that an employee was a thief would not be viewed as sufficiently “intolerable” to justify legal recourse....
⅜ ⅝ 9)e * * *
[O]nce properly terminated, an employee can thereafter be blacklisted by deliberate falsehoods.
Diamond Shamrock Refining and Mktg. Co. v. Mendez, 844 S.W.2d 198, 219 & n. 19 (Tex.1992) (Doggett, J., dissenting).1
Despite the overwriting in Mendez, there are a few circumstances in which a cause of action for intentional infliction of emotional distress would be appropriate in an employment dismissal context. Though the majority obviously thinks otherwise, evidence, for example, that an employer falsely and knowingly accused an employee of criminal misconduct — behavior that would in any other circumstance be actionable— should not be immunized from liability simply because it occurred in an employment context.
Here Diana Casas basically complains of the fact of her termination and the basis thereof; she failed to provide any summary judgment evidence of outrageous independent conduct or anything else of legal significance to distinguish her firing from any ordinary termination. Though she apparently had a subjective belief that her dismissal was related to her knowledge of coworker dishonesty, she never reported this to anyone nor did she attempt to make any claims either here or in the court of appeals that she was a “whistleblower,” as I have described that justified exception to the employment-at-will doctrine in Winters v. Houston Chronicle Publ. Co., 795 S.W.2d 723, 725 (Tex.1990) (Doggett, J., concurring). See also Michael J. McKiernan, Protection for Private Employee Whistleblowers in Texas? 54 Tex.B.J. 667 (1991) (discussing concurrence’s “guidance to both employers and employees by defining the elements of a [whistleblower] cause of action”); David M. Feldman, Maretta C. Toedt, and Robin W. Coopwood, Employment-at-Will in Texas: When and How Will the Whistle Blow? 10 Corporate Counsel Rev. 119 (1991) (appropriately “ad-vis[ing] [employers] to pay heed to the elements set forth [in the concurrence]”).
Accordingly, I concur in today’s judgment but not the opinion.
Justice GAMMAGE joins in this concurring opinion.

. Though eager here and in Mendez to declare as a matter of law that certain conduct is not outrageous, the majority is obviously unwilling to declare conduct, no matter how egregious, legally outrageous. See Boyles v. Kerr, 855 S.W.2d 593, 611 (Tex.1993) (refusing to find outrageous the surreptitious videotaping of a woman during sexual intercourse and subsequent showing of the tape to others); Twyman v. Twyman, 855 S.W.2d 619 (Tex.1993) (remanding for trial issue of whether man’s insistence that a prior rape victim engage in bondage activities was outrageous).