When you begin each chapter of a law book, the initial case or caption is almost always good law.  By good law, I mean accurate and moral.  This is law that makes sense and is unoffensive to those who value life, liberty, and property (but I repeat myself).  This shall henceforth be known as The Learned Sergeant’s Rule:  The first case in each chapter of a casebook is just law.  With each following case, the law becomes more diluted and unjust.  This rule applies to all law books and each chapter within.

Let us apply this rule to “public policy” exceptions to workplace law.  The first case in this particular book refers to a case in 1884, Payne v. The Western & Atlantic Railroad Co. where a business owner sues the local railroad company for threatening to fire employees who shopped at his store.  The court dismissed the claim stating that:

Great corporation, strong associations, and wealthy individuals may thus do great mischief and wrong; may make and break merchants at will; may crush out competition, and foster monopolies, and thus greatly injure individuals and the public; but power is inherent in size and strength and wealth; and the law cannot set bound to it, unless it is exercised illegally.  Then it is restrained because of its illegality, not because of its quantity or quality.  The great and rich and powerful are guaranteed the same liberty and privilege as the poor and weak.  All may buy and sell when they choose; they may refuse to employ or dismiss whom they choose, without being thereby guilty of a legal wrong, though it may seriously injure and even ruin others.  The law leaves employer and employee to make their own contracts; and these, when made, it will enforce; beyond this it does not go.

Now fast forward to 1980 and our next case, Sheets v. Teddy’s Frosted Foods, Inc.

Here we have an employee hired at-will.  In other words, an employee who can be fired for no reason at all.  This employee is the quality control manager who is fired after reporting to his employer that they are in violation of state quality control laws.  This employee sues, claiming that the company cannot fire him for that reason.  The court allows the case to go forward stating that it is in the best interests of the public to protect employees who report violations of law.

I will be the first to admit that the man shouldn’t have been fired, but poor behavior of an employer and the court making up law in contravention of the rights of an employer to fire an at-will employee is unacceptable.  But wait friends, the fun doesn’t stop here.

The following cases then proceed to protect employees who are fired for filing a workman’s compensation claim and refusing to commit perjury.  Next, in Nees v. Hock, a 1975 case, an employer is held to have wrongfully fired an employee who specifically requested jury duty when she could have been given a waiver because it would have kept her away from work for 2 weeks.

The problem with public policy, beyond the fact that it effectively gives judges the power to usurp the duties of the legislature, is that those public policies are then to be divined by what that specific court deems is important to the public.  Those policies are often arbitrary and in conflict to legitimate statutory interpretation.  It gets much worse than this friends.  This just so happens to be what I’m reading at the moment.  Public policy is one of the most vile abuses of the legal system pressed upon us by the judicial branch.

A video you ask?  Okay, you’ve earned it, but only if you read the post!