Maryland: Court Extends Retaliatory Discharge Protections to Retaliatory Non-Renewal of Employment Contract

A Maryland appellate court held that, under an appropriate fact pattern, an employer that declines to renew an employment agreement with an injured worker for which the parties anticipated a reasonable possibility of renewal may be liable for a retaliatory discharge claim. Observing that it was a case of first impression, the appellate court noted that Maryland's courts had heretofore only applied the tort of wrongful termination to employees at will and to contractual employees within the time parameters of their employment agreements. Here the worker had been employed as a teacher and had ever expectation that his contract would be renewed. When he sent an email indicating that he would be applying for workers' compensation benefits in connection with his alleged PTSD condition, the school board, several months later, sent him a follow-up email indicating his contract would not be renewed.

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

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See Miller-Phoenix v. Baltimore City Bd. of Sch. Comm’rs, 2020 Md. App. LEXIS 507 (May 29, 2020)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 104.07.

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

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see

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