Georgia: Court Acknowledges “Quagmire” in State’s “Arising Out of Employment” Requirement

Labeling the state’s case law concerning the all-important “arising out of and in the course of employment” standard a “quagmire,” a Georgia appellate court agreed with a trial court that the Board’s Appellate Division misconstrued the legal framework when it found a teacher’s act of “turning and walking was not a risk unique” or peculiar to her work, and was “a risk to which she would have been equally exposed apart from the employment” [2018 Ga. App. LEXIS 203]. The appellate court added that the Appellate Division “fell prey to the confusion that our case law has sown” [Id.]. It said the Appellate Division overlooked the proximate cause requirement and focused on the concept of equal exposure, interpreting it to mean that because the teacher could have fallen outside of work while walking and turning, as she did while she was at work, that her injury resulted from an idiopathic fall and was not compensable. The appellate court stressed that just because an employee could theoretically be exposed to a hazard outside of work that mirrored that which he or she faced while at work did not render an injury resulting from that workplace hazard non-compensable. To hold otherwise would render virtually any case in which an employee is walking, turning, or standing (or some combination of these activities) while performing his or her job non-compensable.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is the co-author of Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law (LexisNexis).

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See Cartersville City Schools v. Johnson, 2018 Ga. App. LEXIS 203 (Mar. 16, 2018)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 7.04.

Source: Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law