answering, in the affirmative, certified question inquiring "whether an employer contravenes public policy when it terminates an at-will employee who violated a company rule in order to go to the assistance of a citizen who was in danger of serious physical injury or death?”
How later courts described this case
- answering, in the affirmative, certified question inquiring "whether an employer contravenes public policy when it terminates an at-will employee who violated a company rule in order to go to the assistance of a citizen who was in danger of serious physical injury or death?”
- adopting these elements from Henry H. Perritt, Jr., Workplace Torts: Rights and Liabilities §§ 3.7, .14, .19, .21 (1991) (hereinafter Perritt, Workplace Torts
- holding a “highest priority on protection of human life” to be a “fundamental public policy,” evidenced by a plethora of otherwise unrelated statutes and judicial opinions
- finding "public policy of saving persons from life threatening situations satisfies the clarity element" before it evaluated whether the public policy had been violated
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
Guy, J.
(concurring) — I concur in the result reached by the majority because I believe it was a violation of public policy when the employer applied this work rule under the facts existing here in order to fire Mr. Gardner. I would not find this work rule to be in violation of public policy in a general sense. However, in this case Mr. Gardner was faced with the decision whether to break what is normally a sensible and reasonable rule for his own and his partner’s safety and save a woman’s life or adhere to the rule and watch a woman he knew be murdered in front of him while he sat safely in his truck with a gun in hand. It defies what I believe is true about human nature that anyone would be willing to watch a person die in order to comply with a company safety rule. I believe our nature *951 would cause any decent person, under these dire circumstances, to break the rule and save the life. Even normally good rules must have exceptions and yield to a higher good. "When the company chose to enforce the rule under these facts, it failed to recognize that Mr. Gardner was acting for the higher good, as would any right-thinking person.
Durham, C.J., concurs with Guy, J.