Private Law Theory

INTRODUCTION
In May 2018, the Metropolitan Opera (the Met) sued their longtime music director, James Levine, for the entire salary paid to him during his forty-one years of employment. The Met claimed that the famed conductor ‘engaged in sexually abusive and harassing conduct both before and during the period when he worked at the Met’ and sought recoupment of the $5.8 million salary as a remedy for his breach of loyalty to the company. In its suit, the Met invoked the faithless servant doctrine, which allows employers to recover damages measured by the compensation paid to disloyal employees during periods of misconduct. The Levine story came in the wake of a recent spike in public attention for workplace sexual harassment across the country …

McKelvy, Elizabeth, The Faithless Servant Doctrine: An Employer’s Remedy for Workplace Sexual Harassment, University of Baltimore Law Review: volume 49 : issue 1, article 5 (2019).

First posted 2020-01-04 08:28:59