14 Wake Forest L. Rev. Online 112
Authored by: Michael Showalter1
Introduction
A recent Second Circuit panel failed to heed the fixed-meaning rule of statutory interpretation, and its flawed opinion highlights the rule's importance to the rule of law. In Palmer v. Amazon, the Second Circuit held that New York's workers-compensation exclusivity does not reach suits for injunctive relief. As in many states, New York statutory law provides that an employer's obligation to pay workers' compensation "shall be exclusive" and "in place of any other liability whatsoever" to an employee for workplace injury. All agree that the provision bars workplace-injury claims for monetary relief, but whether the provision also bars claims for injunctive relief'whether the word liability encompasses injunctions'is contested. The Second Circuit held that the provision does not reach suits for injunctive relief because (in the court's view) being enjoined does not make an employer liable.
While that conclusion may hold intuitive appeal to modern readers engulfed in modern language usage, it is indefensible as a matter of original meaning. The evidence of original meaning is overwhelming'when the statute was enacted in 1914, liability incontestably encompassed injunctive relief. The Second Circuit reached the contrary conclusion by ignoring the evidence.
Because the relevant statutory language involves an extraordinarily consequential difference between original meaning and modern meaning, Palmer highlights the necessity of the fixed-meaning rule. By fixing statutory meaning at the time of enactment, the rule anchors case outcomes to the law actually enacted. When later generations apply legal provisions by reference to modern language usage, by contrast, they are applying a different law'one that the legislature never adopted. That's what the Second Circuit did in Palmer: by substituting its own modern understanding of the word liability for that word's original meaning, the court effectively amended the statute to impose a set of rights and obligations different from what the enacted statute imposes.
I take no position on the policy result, but any policy suboptimality should be resolved through the legislative process rather than by judicial fiat. The New York Court of Appeals should correct the Second Circuit's error when the opportunity arises, and other courts should take care to avoid replicating the error whether in the workers-compensation context or elsewhere.
I. Background
Section 10 of the New York Workers' Compensation statute establishes a scheme that uses employer funding to guarantee compensation for injured workers, and in exchange, Section 11 makes that compensation the exclusive remedy for workplace injury.2 In full, Section 11 begins:
Alternative remedy. 1. The liability of an employer prescribed by the last preceding section shall be exclusive and in place of any other liability whatsoever, to such employee, his or her personal representatives, spouse, parents, dependents, distributees, or any person otherwise entitled to recover damages, contribution or indemnity, at common law or otherwise, on account of such injury or death or liability arising therefrom....3
In Palmer, a group of Amazon employees sued Amazon in the Eastern District of New York over certain "workplace COVID-19 policies, practices, and procedures."4They asserted causes of action for public nuisance and violation of New York's labor law.5They acknowledged that their alleged injuries arose from the workplace, but argued that Section 11 did not apply because they sought injunctive relief rather than damages.6
Because workplace-injury plaintiffs generally seek damages, when the suit was filed only a handful of courts had considered whether workers-compensation exclusivity bars claims for injunctive relief. None of those courts considered original meaning, and each court concluded that prospective relief was not barred.7 Several treatises also had concluded without examining original meaning that state workers-compensation statutes do not bar claims for injunctive relief.8 The district judge agreed with Amazon, however, that "[a]llowing plaintiffs to avoid [Section 11 exclusivity] by seeking only injunctive relief would thwart the purposes of the statute and the trade-offs embodied in it."9
In October 2022 the Second Circuit reversed, as relevant here, concluding that Section 11 "does not bar claims for injunctive relief."10 But the Second Circuit did not seriously engage the issue and its cursory analysis is easily rebutted.
II. LiabilityEncompassed Injunctive Relief at the Time of Enactment
Because it provides that Section 10 liability is exclusive of all alternative remedies for workplace injury, Section 11 is titled "Alternative remedy." Paraphrased for simplification, Section 11 reads:
An employer's workers-compensation liability shall be exclusive and in place of any other liability whatsoever to the employee or his or her family members or anyone entitled to recover damages on his or her behalf.
It is incontestable that when determining whether Section 11 bars claims for injunctive relief, the sole interpretive question concerns the scope of the term liability. If that term means monetary or retrospective relief only, then Section 11 does not reach claims for injunctive relief. But if the meaning of liability encompasses injunctive relief, then Section 11 bars claims for injunctive relief because Section 10 liability is "exclusive and in place of" that liability. The only question, to repeat, is whether being enjoined makes an employer "liab[le]" as that term is used in Section 11.
While courts often must interpret legal terms in the face of conflicting evidence, the evidence here is wholly one-sided: the term liability included both monetary and injunctive relief when the New York Workers' Compensation statute was enacted in 1914. That's most obvious from enactment-era dictionaries,11 which explain that liability referred broadly to "[t]he state of being bound or obliged in law or justice [i.e., equity] to do, pay, or make good something; legal responsibility."12 To be liable, likewise, was to be bound in law "or equity."13
By specifically naming equitable relief as a form of liability, these dictionary definitions provide dispositive evidence that the term liability included injunctions at the time of enactment. These definitions do not merely encompass injunctions with their scope'they single out equitable relief as a prototypical kind of liability. A court interpreting a statutory reference to "animals," for example, may need to grapple with whether an oyster is an animal for purposes of the statute because although oysters technically are animals, they are far from the prototype. Here, by contrast, the dictionary definitions leave no doubt that being enjoined is a prototypical form of liability because they specifically name it as such. A trustworthy dictionary definition that includes "e.g., x" ends all disputes about whether x belongs in the category being defined.
Far from contradicting the dictionaries, other evidence from around the time of enactment emphatically supports them. In 1949, a time much closer to enactment than we are today, the Second Circuit observed that liability is "quite differentiated from a mere duty to pay damages."14 And in 1995, the New York Court of Appeals cited cases from 1943 and 1960 for the assertion that "courts have rejected the proposition that 'liability' means money damages only" and concluded that "'liability,' as a legal term, has an appreciably broader meaning than pecuniary obligations."15 Liability, the 1949 Second Circuit explained, is simply the "opposite of immunity."16 If a person is not liable, therefore, the person is immune from suit.17
For that reason, the New York Court of Appeals explained in 1934 that the New York Workers' Compensation statute "covers the entire field of remedy against an employer for industrial accident."18 A judge for the Eastern District of New York likewise stated in 1943 that the workers-compensation scheme is "exclusive of all other remedies."19 The "entire field of remedy," of course, includes injunctions.20 Section 11 "destroys theright of actionof the employee and his personal representatives against his employer," a New York court explained in 1945, regardless of the remedy sought.21
Statutory purpose points in the same direction. The Workers' Compensation statute was a "quid pro quo"22 in which "both classes, employer and employé, gained benefits and made concessions."23 Specifically, workers gained guaranteed compensation for workplace injury, while employers gained immunity from workplace-injury suits, which included the "avoidance of litigation" and associated "expense."24 After paying for guaranteed compensation, the deal went, employers would be off the hook for "any other liability whatsoever."25 Putting them back on the hook through litigation and injunctions foils the bargain by upending one side of the quid pro quo.
Finally, statutory context also supports the view that Section 11 reaches claims for injunctive relief. Because Section 10 outlines the workers' end of the deal (guaranteed compensation), it repeatedly uses the narrow term "compensation." But Section 11, which establishes the employers' end of the deal (no other remedy), switches to the broader terms "[r]emedy"'in its title, no less26 ' and "liability." This variation in word choice suggests that the legislature used the broader terms in Section 11 "intentionally."27
In sum, whatever liability means now, it is crystal clear that at the time of enactment, liability encompassed injunctions.
III. The Second Circuit Failed to Engage Original Meaning
In concluding...
