Court Limits Commuting Teacher, Entrepreneur Suits Over Injuries

The state Supreme Court, in dual rulings on Tuesday, restricted the rights of teachers to collect money for injuries sustained while driving home, where they do homework, and limited suits by self-employed entrepreneurs.

In a case that drew considerable interest from insurance companies and schoolteachers, the court, in a 5-2 vote, said the widow of a Santa Rosa Junior College mathematics teacher, who died in a 1982 car accident while commuting home, could not collect workers’ compensation benefits.

The ruling reversed an appeals court and the Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board, which had awarded benefits to JoAnne Smyth. Her husband, Joseph, on the date of the accident, had taken student papers home for the evening, as he often did, rather than grade them in his school office.

Workers who are hurt during commutes to or from work generally are not covered by workers’ compensation, unless employers require them to work at home.

Effective Teacher

Smyth’s lawyers had argued that Smyth was required to bring work home to remain an effective teacher, a position adopted by two dissenters on the high court, Justice Cruz Reynoso and Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird.

However, the majority declined to create what insurance company lawyers warned would become an exception that would benefit all white-collar workers. The lawyers argued that most professionals take work home.

By allowing benefits for teachers, the court would be authorizing compensation for any worker who brings work home and is hurt during a commute. That would greatly increase insurance costs, company attorneys said.

The court said Smyth worked at home by choice and was not required to take papers home. Pointing to the difficulty of fashioning a rule to cover such workers, Justice Otto M. Kaus wrote:

“Would the fact that an employee regularly took work-related materials home suffice to create a second job site, or would the employee have to show that he actually worked at home? How would we treat employees who work at home on some evenings but not on others, depending on their personal inclinations?” (Santa Rosa Junior College vs. Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board, S.F. 24758.)

In the second case, the court reversed an appellate court, concluding by a 5-2 vote that a state Civil Code section does not allow a corporation to sue a third party who injures one of its key employees.

The opinion by Justice Joseph Grodin came in the case of a self-employed clothier, whose corporation sued the driver of a car that ran into him while he was walking his dog. The court said that while Edwin Weinrot and his wife could sue the driver who ran over him in 1982, the corporation could not.

‘No Relevance’

The court said cases that allowed for such suits were “archaic” and stemmed from days when employees were viewed as an employers’ “chattel” and had “no relevance to present-day employer-employee relationships.”

Justices Stanley Mosk, joined by Bird, dissented, arguing that the statute at issue allowed for such suits, although he agreed that the law was outdated. (I. J. Weinrot & Son vs. Mart Bailey Jackson, et al., L.A. 32028.)