At Will Employees and Self Defense

This is a string of links, which I'll begin at Instapundit. Which will lead you to the link to Volokh Conspiracy.

The topic is Feliciano v. 7-Eleven :

In Feliciano v. 7-Eleven, a masked woman with a gun attempted to rob the 7-Eleven where Feliciano worked. While the robber was distracted by another employee, Feliciano grabbed her gun, and held her captive until the police arrived. "Following this incident, 7-Eleven terminated Feliciano, who was an at will employee, for failure to comply with its company policy which prohibits employees from subduing or otherwise interfering with a store robbery."

The finding relates to self-defense relating to "lethal imminent danger."

we hold that when an at will employee has been discharged from his/her employment based upon his/her exercise of self-defense in response to lethal imminent danger, such right of self-defense constitutes a substantial public policy exception to the at will employment doctrine and will sustain a cause of action for wrongful discharge. Consistent with our prior precedent, we hold further that an employer may rebut an employee's prima facie case of wrongful discharge resulting from the employee's use of self-defense in response to lethal imminent danger by demonstrating that it had a plausible and legitimate business reason to justify the discharge.

This is a good finding in that it does allow the employee to choose action of self-defense even should the employer specify that such actions are prohibited. Prohibition of self-defense strikes me as having reasons, but not being reasonable. Where does the employee draw the line? Should the female employee have no right to self-defense when the perpetrator is dragging her into a back room to rape her? I also question where the responsibility of the employer then must be drawn to provide for a secure work environment.

Professor Bainbridge has an entry on this and most apparently has his head stuck up a legal orifice. He starts with relating this to "gun nuts" and then going onto a legal rant:

Not being much of a gun nut, I have a somewhat different take. Namely, this is yet another judicial blow against freedom of contract and private property rights. It's also a blow against workers. The economic effects of judicially created exceptions to the at-will employment doctrine are well-established.

AND

You might say, "well, this is just a little exception to at will employment and it protects Constitutional rights." If so, you would be wrong. It would take a remarkably extremist understanding of the Second Amendment, as well as an utter misunderstanding of the state action requirement, to believe that one has a Constitutional right to possess and use firearms on your employer's property.

Apparently the prof misses the point completely. This isn't a gun rights case, it's a self-defense case. He also misses the point that the employee in this case was unarmed. I would have left a comment, but his is another of the blogs that doesn't have them.

Trigger Finger goes more in depth on the discussion in a related blog. I think his reasoning is much better than that shown by the Prof.