[SOLVED] M.J. v. Wisan Utah Supreme Court,

M.J. v. Wisan
Utah Supreme Court, 2016 UT 13, 371 P.3d 21 (2016).
In the Language of the Court
Associate Chief Justice LEE:
[Members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (“FLDS Church”) in Utah formed the United Effort Plan Trust (“UEP Trust” or the “Trust”). The Trust] members deeded their property to the UEP Trust to be managed by Church leaders. Church leaders, who were also trustees, then used this property to minister to the needs of the members. [At the time of the events leading up to this case,] the Trust was operated for the express purpose of furthering the doctrines of the FLDS Church, including the practice of marriage involving underage girls. [Later, as a result of unrelated litigation, a state court reformed the Trust] by excising the purpose of advancing the religious doctrines and goals of the FLDS Church to the degree that any of these were illegal, including sexual activity between adults and minors. [The court appointed Bruce Wisan to head the Trust.] [Later,]
M.J., a former member of the FLDS Church and beneficiary of the UEP Trust, [filed this suit in a Utah state court against Wisan, as head of the Trust, alleging that] when she was fourteen years old, she was forced to marry Allen Steed, her first cousin. The wedding was performed by Warren Jeffs, who at the time was acting president of both the FLDS Church and the Trust. M.J. claims that Steed repeatedly sexually assaulted and raped her.
She requested a divorce from Steed on multiple occasions, but Jeffs refused to allow it. He also refused to let M.J. live separately from her husband. She seeks to hold the Trust vicariously liable for intentional infliction of emotional distress. M.J. claims that Jeffs and other trustees were acting “in furtherance of the trust administration and within the scope of their authority,” and thus contends that the Trust should be liable under the doctrine of respondeat superior. The Trust filed a series of motions for summary judgment. All of those motions were denied. The Trust then filed [this] petition for review. Under [Utah Code Section 75–7–1010, Utah’s version of Section 1010 of the Uniform Trust Code,] a trust is liable for the trustee’s acts performed “in the course of administering the trust.” The terms of the statute, in context, are quite clear. “In the course of” is the traditional formulation of the standard for vicarious liability under the doctrine of respondeat superior. We accordingly interpret the Uniform Trust Act as incorporating the established standard of respondeat superior liability.
Thus, under [Section 75–7–1010] a trust is liable for the acts of a trustee when the trustee was acting within the scope of his responsibility as a trustee. [Emphasis added.] The difficult question for the law in this field has been to define the line between a course of conduct subject to the employer’s control and an independent course of conduct not connected to the principal. An independent course of conduct is a matter so removed from the agent’s duties that the law, in fairness, eliminates the principal’s vicarious liability. Such a course of conduct is one that represents a departure from, not an escalation of, conduct involved in performing assigned work or other conduct that an employer permits or controls. [Emphasis added.]
Our cases have identified three factors of relevance to this inquiry: (1) whether the agent’s conduct is of the general kind the agent is employed to perform; (2) whether the agent is acting within the hours of the agent’s work and the ordinary spatial boundaries of the employment; and (3) whether the agent’s acts were motivated, at least in part, by the purpose of serving the principal’s interest. In the case law of a number of states, spatial and time boundaries are no longer essential hallmarks of an agency relationship. Instead, the law now recognizes that agents may interact on an employer’s behalf with third parties although the employee is neither situated on the employer’s premises nor continuously or exclusively engaged in performing assigned work. A number of courts have also questioned the viability of the requirement that an agent’s acts be motivated in some part by an intention to serve the principal’s purposes. In [some] jurisdictions, courts avoid the use of motive or intention to determine whether an employee’s tortious conduct falls within the scope of employment and adopt a different standard for identifying the tie between the tortfeasor’s employment and the tort.
One such standard is whether the tort is a generally foreseeable consequence of the enterprise undertaken by the employer or is incident to it—in other words, whether the agent’s conduct is not so unusual or startling that it seems unfair to include the loss resulting from it in the employer’s business costs, or whether the tort was engendered by the employment or an outgrowth of it. Another considers whether the employment furnished the specific impetus for a tort or increased the general risk that the tort would occur. These tests leave to the finder of fact the challenge of determining whether a tortfeasor’s employment did more than create a happenstance opportunity to commit the tort.
To resolve this case, we need not choose between the purpose or motive test and the alternative formulations because we find that the Trust’s attempts to defeat its liability on summary judgment fail under any of the formulations. We do openly endorse one particular aspect of the doctrine of respondeat superior, however. Specifically, we hold that an agent need not be acting within the hours of the employee’s work and the ordinary spatial boundaries of the employment in order to be acting within the course of his employment.
We acknowledge that in today’s business world much work is performed for an employer away from a defined work space and outside of a limited work shift. And we accordingly reject the Trust’s attempt to escape liability on the ground that Jeffs’s acts as a trustee were not performed while he was on the Trust’s clock or at a work space designated for his work for the Trust. Instead we hold that the key question is whether Jeffs was acting within the scope of employment when performing work assigned by the employer or engaging in a course of conduct subject to the employer’s control. [The Trust argues] that settled caselaw establishes “as a matter of law that the sexual misconduct of an employee is outside the scope of employment.” Granted, there are many cases that so conclude and some of those cases turn principally on the ground that an agent who commits a sexual assault cannot be viewed as advancing, even in part, the purposes of his principal. Yet some of the cases in this field (particularly more recent ones) adopt a standard that turns not on motive or purpose but on foreseeability, or on whether the employee’s acts were engendered by or an outgrowth of the employment, or the employment furnished the impetus for the tort. And we conclude that this is one of those cases.
Given Jeffs’s unique role as leader of the FLDS Church, and in light of the unusual, troubling function of marriage involving young brides in the FLDS culture, we hold that a reasonable factfinder could conclude that Jeffs was acting within the scope of his role as a trustee in directing Steed to engage in sexual activity with M.J. We affirm the denial of the Trust’s motions for summary judgment on that basis.
Legal Reasoning Questions
1. Why do some courts apply a standard for imposing vicarious liability that does not rely on motive or purpose to determine whether an agent’s tortious conduct falls within the scope of employment?
2. Why, in some states, are the boundaries of work time and space no longer essential factors in determining the scope of employment in an agency relationship?
3. Whom does the result in this case benefit? Why?

Question: M.J. v. Wisan Utah Supreme Court,