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)
“Happy is that mother whose ability to help her children continues on from babyhood and manhood into maturity. Blessed is the son who need not leave his mother at the threshold of the world’s activities, but may always and everywhere have her blessing and her help. Thrice blessed are the son and the mother between whom there exists an association not only physical and affectional, but spiritual and intellectual, and broad and wise as is the scope of each being.”
—Lydia Hoyt Farmer (1842–1903)
“What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)