Vintage Posner
This case, Carla Yuknis v. First Student Inc., which I picked off Project Posner recently, is vintage Richard Posner:
The plaintiff had complained, initially to the company’s regional vice-president, that “all levels of personnel” at the facility at which she worked “show blatant disrespect for their marital vows, watch pornography, use foul language, tell vulgar jokes,. .. [and] gamble openly.” She accused one of her coworkers of giving an assistant manager of the facility “red underwear made to look like an elephant’s head, with a sexually-suggestive trunk” at an office party, and accused another — the manager, no less — that among other enormities he had referred to a female bus driver (not the plaintiff) as a “fat ass,” had had an affair with another female driver, sold Avon products at work, told the plaintiff that his teenage daughter had watched him walk from the shower to his bedroom naked, and described an incident in which his male cat “raped” his female cat. There is more but this recital will give the flavor.[...]One is put in mind of the distinction famously drawn by John Stuart Mill, in chapter 4 of On Liberty (1859), between “self-regarding” and “other-regarding” conduct. The former term refers to acts that inflict a direct harm on one, such as an assault, or a breach of contract, or an insult, and the latter to acts that harm one only in the sense that one is offended to learn about the conduct. The example Mill gave of an other-regarding act was the distress that people in Britain felt upon learning that Mormons in Utah (this was before the Mormon Church renounced polygamy) were practicing polygamy six thousand miles away. The counterpart today would be a worker offended by the fact that a coworker was of a different race or religion. The manager’s watching pornography was likewise in the nature of an “other-regarding” act so far as the plaintiff was concerned.…