Scope of employment is the legal consideration of the various activities which may occur in the performance of a person's job, especially those acts which are reasonable relative to the job description and foreseeable by the employer.
Key examples of this consideration under US law can include tort liability of the employer due to a duty to supervise or control the employee. If a security guard harms a customer in a retail store, a court may consider if the employee's harmful acts were foreseeable by the employer to the point that the employer should have instituted reasonable precautions to prevent the resulting harm. Extreme examples would likely find the employer is liable for the employee using a gun which was permitted on the job, but perhaps not if strict instructions against carrying guns on the job had been given to the employee who ignored them.
Famous quotes containing the words scope of, scope and/or employment:
“For it is not the bare words but the scope of the writer that gives the true light, by which any writing is to be interpreted; and they that insist upon single texts, without considering the main design, can derive no thing from them clearly.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)
“Every person is responsible for all the good within the scope of his abilities, and for no more, and none can tell whose sphere is the largest.”
—Gail Hamilton (1833–1896)
“My job as a reservationist was very routine, computerized ... I had no free will. I was just part of that stupid computer.”
—Beryl Simpson, U.S. employment counselor; former airline reservationist. As quoted in Working, book 2, by Studs Terkel (1973)