The American Law Institute is creating a Restatement Third, Employment Law. Chapter 8 of Tentative Draft No. 4, which was discussed today at the Annual Meeting, is entitled "Employee Obligations and Restrictive Covenants." Within that chapter is a section entitled "Employee Duty of Loyalty." This is the core obligation:

Employees owe a duty of loyalty to their employer in matters related to the employment relationship.

This is an uncontroversial (re)statement of the black-letter law, but some members of the ALI challenged the use of the word "loyalty." As noted by several of the ALI bloggers, some members want the ALI to omit references to "loyalty" because it implies that the relationship between employers and employers is reciprocal. These members prefer the term "mandatory obligation," which (to them) connotes that employment is a one-way street.

Although Reporter Samuel Estreicher did not grant the point, he repeatedly invoked the need to "delimit" the concept of loyalty and suggested that the "duty of loyalty" in the ALI's Restatement of the Law Third, Agency was ill-defined. These comments suggest the possibility of some future work to be done rationalizing the duty of loyalty in the two Restatements.

Count me as a fan of the duty of loyalty and as an opponent of attempts to delimit that duty. Such attempts, which surface regularly in the law of business associations, run at cross purposes with the value of the duty as a standard of last resort. Self-interested behavior may be constrained by statute or by contract, but the issue in cases involving the duty of loyalty is whether self-interest was checked in the absence of a specific rule. If courts (or Restatement drafters) are too precise with the boundaries of the duty, they provide bad men with a roadmap for opportunistic behavior. As I have written many times on this blog, ambiguity is our friend in this area.

Employees, Fiduciary Law | Bookmark

TrackBack URL for this entry:
https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8345157d569e201538e8d89f0970b

Links to weblogs that reference In Defense of Loyalty: