New Jersey Supreme Court: Schools ‘vicariously liable’ in sexual abuse cases

If sexual abuse by a teacher took place outside the scope of the teacher’s employment or off school property, is the district still liable?

New Jersey’s Supreme Court believes so, in a decision made March 11.

“The New Jersey Supreme Court in a 6-1 opinion recently ruled that the state’s Child Victims Act that was enacted in 2019 ‘fundamentally altered’ the law governing civil claims against public entities and certain private entities arising from sexual abuse,” wrote Andrew G. Simpson for Insurance Journal.

“The ruling came in response to appeals from four people who alleged that New Jersey public school teachers sexually abused them when they were high school students.”

This higher standard – called “vicarious liability” in extending legal responsibility to parties controlling the violators – had not been in place before 2019.

Changes under the Child Victims Act

Four cases were involved in the court’s ruling. The first was Russell Forde Hornor v. Upper Freehold Regional Board of Education.

“Hornor asserted that the Upper Freehold Regional Board of Education was vicariously liable for science teacher Charles Hutler’s alleged sexual abuse of him at Hutler’s home in 1979, when Hornor was 15 years old, and that the school board breached a fiduciary duty to him,” Simpson wrote.

Three others were consolidated as Ormond Simpkins, Jr. v. South Orange-Maplewood School District, and arose over “sexual abuse allegedly committed by English and special education teacher Nicole Dufault,” according to the article.

“The school districts had argued that the teachers’ misconduct was outside the scope of employment and thus the schools were protected from liability under the Tort Claims Act (TCA),” Simpson explained. “The TCA, enacted in 1972, barred virtually all claims for public entity vicarious liability arising from public employees’ sexual assaults of children.”

However, the Child Victims Act passed in 2019 “fundamentally altered the law governing civil claims against public entities and certain private entities arising from sexual abuse,” state Supreme Court justices explained.

As a result, the state now has a new standard for determining vicarious liability claims against public schools, according to the article.

“The court said the factfinder must determine that:

(1) The school gave the employee who allegedly committed sexual abuse or other sexual misconduct the authority to control the student’s educational environment;

(2) the school employee’s exercise of that authority resulted in the sexual abuse or sexual misconduct; and

(3) it reasonably appeared that the school employee’s sexual abuse of or sexual misconduct against the student was tacitly approved by the school.”

Such a standard needs to be case-specific and account for all circumstances, judges ruled.

As previously reported by The Lion, the scope of sexual abuse committed by public educators remains unclear but significantly underestimated.

“We’ve been collecting Google alerts since 2014 on teacher arrests, just for sexual misconduct type of offenses,” said Terri Miller, president of the organization S.E.S.A.M.E. “95% of educator sexual misconduct cases are handled in-house and are never reported to law enforcement. The numbers of arrests are just a fraction of the problem. But there have been thousands just since 2014.”