Carl v. Children's Hospital, 702 A.2d 159 (1997)

Citation: Carl v. Children's Hospital, 702 A.2d 159 (1997)
Parent Document: Carl v. Children's Hospital, 702 A.2d 159 (1997)
Jurisdiction: DC (municipal)
Effective Date: 1997-09-23
Original Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/2395626/carl-v-childrens-hospital/ ↗

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Furthermore, there is no indication that the Council has expressed, or implied, a desire to keep the wrongful discharge area to itself. To the contrary, as we have seen, when recently enacting displaced workers legislation the Council expressly preserved the “employee’s right to bring a common law cause of action for wrongful termination.”42 The Council, of course, has shown that it knows how to cover a field; we would be entirely off base if we were not to conclude that the Council had preempted, for example, the legal fields represented by the exhaustive list of Human Rights Act prohibitions against discrimination in employment,43 or the comprehensive Rental Housing Act rules governing evictions of tenants at will,44 or the detailed Workers Compensation Act provisions addressing on-the-job injuries.45 But wrongful discharge legislation, enacted in individual pieces over the years, leaves room for common law courts to complement the legislature by acting “in one of the ‘open spaces’ in the law of this jurisdiction”46 to address on the merits, “yes” or “no,” the claims of litigants like Linda Carl, rather than simply punting the subject to the legislature—unless, of course, there are other persuasive reasons why, in this particular area of the law, the legislature is the only agency of government that should act. I turn, more specifically, to that final inquiry. III.

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