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Perodeau v. City of Hartford3/26/2002
, the same public policy considerations that arise in an ongoing employment context arise in the context of an employment termination. An employer who wishes to terminate an inept employee is faced with the same risk of a spurious lawsuit as an employer who wishes to reprimand an inept employee. Accordingly, I cannot perceive any principle on which to make the distinction made by the majority.
Indeed, I do not believe that this issue ever would have arisen in the District Court if not for the mere fortuity that a number of other courts simply have misinterpreted our statement in Parsons v. United Technologies Corp., 243 Conn. 66, 88, 700 A.2d 655 (1997), that ''negligent infliction of emotional distress in the employment context arises only where it is 'based upon unreasonable conduct of the defendant in the termination process' '' to mean that a termination is a condition precedent to a claim of negligent infliction of emotional distress in the workplace. As I already have indicated, I can perceive no reason to adopt that misreading in this case. Although the decision of the majority may reduce the number of claims brought under Montinieri, I do not believe that it will reduce the percentage of spurious claims.
I further note that Connecticut apparently is now the only jurisdiction to draw a distinction between negligent infliction of emotional distress claims arising in the context of ongoing employment and claims involving termination of employment. I recognize, as the majority points out, that most of our sister states have a more restricted cause of action for negligent infliction of emotional distress than the standard we adopted in Montinieri. I do not believe, however, that this court should adopt an expansive cause of action and then attempt to mitigate the resulting public policy concerns by imposing arbitrary, piecemeal restrictions on its cognizability. See Mendillo v. Board of Education, 246 Conn. 456, 485, 717 A.2d 1177 (1998) (declining to recognize cause of action for loss of parental consortium on ground that ''we would have to impose arbitrary limitations on the scope of the cause of action in order to avoid the creation of a practically unlimited class of potential plaintiffs''). ''Courts operating in the quintessential common-law context . . . function best, and command the most respect, when their decisions can be defended on grounds of reason and principle. Although courts are, like legislatures, often in the business of drawing lines, how we are expected to draw lines differs significantly from how the legislature is expected to draw lines. Whereas legislatures often draw arbitrary lines, we are expected to draw lines based on reason and principle, and to rely on arbitrary limits only when the policy reasons are sufficiently persuasive to justify performing such an extraordinary task.'' Id., 486-87.
I would conclude that the cause of action recognized by this court in Montinieri is cognizable both in the context of ongoing employment and in cases involving termination of employment. Accordingly, I respectfully dissent.
SECOND CONCURRENCE
NORCOTT, J., concurring and dissenting.
I concur with parts I and II A of the majority opinion. I also join, in part, the Chief Justice's dissent with respect to part II B of the majority opinion. I agree with the dissent that the majority's distinction between claims involving termination and claims in an ongoing employment context is arbitrary. In my opinion, employers have a legal duty to avoid subjecting their employees to the negligent infliction of emotional distress whether the claim arises in the ongoing employment context or through a termination event. I write separately, howe
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