holding that the plaintiff’s allegations that his employer “falsely depict[ed]” him “in the community as a thief” and “potential employers[] knew that he had been terminated for stealing,” even if true, “fall short of being beyond all possible bounds of decency, atrocious, and utterly intolerable in a civilized community”
How later courts described this case
- holding that the plaintiff’s allegations that his employer “falsely depict[ed]” him “in the community as a thief” and “potential employers[] knew that he had been terminated for stealing,” even if true, “fall short of being beyond all possible bounds of decency, atrocious, and utterly intolerable in a civilized community”
- stating “there would be little left of the employment-at-will doctrine if an employer’s public statement of the reason for termination was, so long as the employee disputed that reason, in and of itself some evidence that a tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress had been committed”
- holding that falsely depicting the plaintiff in the community as a thief is not sufficiently outrageous to raise a fact issue on outrageous conduct
- ruling that employer allegedly accusing an employee of thievery and firing him is insufficient to constitute outrageous behavior
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
CONCURRING OPINION ON MOTION FOR REHEARING
CORNYN, Justice,
concurring.
I write only to respond to the dissenting justice’s accusations in his opinion on motion for rehearing that the court has “once again demonstrate^] its lack of concern for important human rights,” supra at 221, that the court has “erect[ed] a double standard for justice in Texas,” supra, at 222, and that the court is “seeking ways to subvert [the right to trial by jury].” supra at 223.
It is not unusual for judges to disagree about the merits of a contested legal issue; it happens everyday in this court and in courts throughout the nation. It has obviously occurred in this case. It is another thing altogether for a judge to declare himself to be the champion of one side of a case, while ignoring or summarily dismissing the legal rights of an opposing party. Texans expect and are entitled to better from the individuals to whom they have entrusted the solemn duty of administering equal justice under law than to resort to personal attacks on those with different views of the law.
It is a judge’s job to carefully weigh competing interests and strike a delicate, perhaps imperfect, balance between those competing interests. That is what the court has done in this case. Obviously, the dissenting justice disagrees. But as Roscoe Pound, Dean Emeritus of the Harvard Law School, has written:
The opinions of the judge of the highest court of a state are no place for intemperate denunciation of the judge’s colleagues, violent invective, attributing of bad motives to the majority of the court, and insinuations of incompetence, negligence, prejudice, or obtuseness of fellow members of the court.
Roscoe Pound, Cacoethes Dissentiendi: The Heated Judicial Dissent, 39 A.B.A.J. 794, 795 (Sept. 1953). The dissenting justice’s remarks represent another example of an unfortunate tendency toward intoler- *221 anee for honest differences of legal opinion on this court. 1
HECHT, J., joins this concurring opinion on motion for rehearing.
. See e.g., Boyles v. Kerr, 1992 WL 353277 (Tex.1992) (Doggett, J., dissenting) ("the majority rewrites Texas law and recants the respect for human dignity affirmed by this court in St. Elizabeth Hospital [v. Garrard, 730 S.W.2d 649 (Tex.1987) ]”); Elabaor v. Smith, 845 S.W.2d 240 (Tex.1992) (Doggett, J., dissenting) ("plunging helter-skelter into uncharted territory to save another medical doctor that a jury found to have committed malpractice, the majority writes without regard to the chaotic effect of its ruling....”); Russell v. Ingersoll-Rand, 841 S.W.2d 343 (Tex.1992) (Doggett, J., dissenting) ("henceforth any action for the death of a loved one can be barred before it accrues.... That is the objective of another injustice committed by a majority that is not slowed in the slightest either by a statute ... or its own recent writing to the contrary”); Walker v. Packer, 827 S.W.2d 833, 846 (Tex.1992) (Doggett, J., dissenting) ("many judicial excesses far beyond the scope of anything alleged in this particular case will henceforth receive only an official nod and wink from the Texas Supreme Court"); Stewart Title Guar. Co. v. Sterling, 822 S.W.2d 1, 13 (Tex.1991) (Doggett, J., dissenting) ("The court’s growing fear that victims of injustice will get too much justice causes it to confer a windfall on wrongdoers”); Moreno v. Sterling Drug, Inc., 787 S.W.2d 348, 367 (Tex.1990) (Doggett, J., dissenting) ("the court’s opinion can rightly be recorded as one of the most anti-family decisions in recent memory”).