Kaplan v. Alpha Epsilon Phi Sorority
| Decision Date | 06 April 1950 |
| Docket Number | No. 35092,35092 |
| Parties | KAPLAN v. ALPHA EPSILON PHI SORORITY et al. |
| Court | Minnesota Supreme Court |
Syllabus by the Court.
1. Where an award or denial of compensation has been made through a misapprehension or misapplication of a controlling principle of law, the case may be remanded to the industrial commission for rehearing.
2. Where a principal movement or errand of an employe is accompanied by a deviation or detour therefrom, the dominant-purpose test should be used for the limited function of determining, when the principal movement or errand is undertaken from a mixture of motives, whether such principal movement or errand belongs to the employer or to the employe personally.
3. If the principal errand belongs to the employer and there are any detours for purely personal objectives, such detours must be separated from the main trip and the employe held to be outside the scope of his employment during such detours; but if such principal errand belongs to the employe, then such detours as are made for the purpose of dispatching business for his employer must be held to be within the scope of the employment.
4. If the employment creates the necessity for an employe's errand, it is wholly immaterial whether such errand is beneficial or detrimental to the employer.
John A. Goldie, Minneapolis, for relator.
C. A. Stark, Minneapolis, for respondents.
Certiorari to review an order of the industrial commission denying compensation on the ground that relator's injury did not arise out of and in the course of her employment.
Relator, Dora Kaplan, was employed as house mother for the respondent Alpha Epsilon Phi Sorority. She lived in the sorority house, which is located near the University of Minnesota campus in Minneapolis. Girls who come from homes outside the city live and regularly take their meals in the sorority house. Other members from the Twin Cities area eat occasional meals at the house. Relator, who was subject to call 24 hours a day, performed duties akin to those of a mother in looking after her home and family. She ordered the food, supervised the preparation of meals and household cleaning, acted as a chaperon, hostess, confidante and adviser for the girls, and was responsible for the observance of reasonable hours.
Relator sustained her injury on the evening of October 31, 1947, after she had left the sorority house, which is located on Tenth avenue southeast and Fifth street. She walked on the west side of Tenth avenue until she reached Fourth street, where she proceeded to cross to the east side of Tenth avenue. As she was about to step up on the opposite Tenth avenue curb, which had been greased by Halloween pranksters, she slipped, fell, and broke her hip. Relator testified that at the time she was on her way to Grays Drug Store located about four blocks to the east at the corner of Fourteenth avenue southeast and Fourth street to purchase bandages to replenish the supply which she maintained as part of the sorority house first-aid kit, and that she intended, after making such purchase, to take a streetcar to attend religious services at Temple Israel, where she had been a communicant for 20 years.
1. Although the evidence will reasonably sustain a finding that relator's intended trip to Temple Israel was a personal mission and not a mission undertaken as part of her duties as spiritual supervisor for the girls or for the benefit of the sorority generally in cultivating favorable public relations with the parents of present and future sorority members, the decision of the industrial commission must be reversed and the matter remanded for a rehearing, in that the findings, taken as a whole, were made under an erroneous application of the law. Where an award or denial of compensation has been made through a misapprehension or misapplication of a controlling principle of law, the case may be remanded to the commission for rehearing. Hogan v. Twin City Amusement Trust Estate, 155 Minn. 199, 193 N.W. 122; Klika v. Independent School Dist. No. 79, 161 Minn. 461, 202 N.W. 30; 6 Dunnell, Dig. & Supp. § 10426.
The commission's majority opinion, in reversal of the referee's findings, after determining that relator's dominant purpose in leaving the sorority house was to go on a personal mission to Temple Israel, held that the accident did not arise out of and in the course of her employment, although at the time of her injury she may have been on her way to the drugstore to buy bandages for her employer. Apparently, the commission assumed that, if the trip to the drugstore was but an incidental part of her personal activities that evening, it necessarily followed that any injury sustained on that trip did not arise out of her employment. The application of the dominant-motive or dominant-purpose rule does not call for a construction which arbitrarily holds the entire journey of an employe to be wholly 'fish or fowl' without regard to whether a deviation or detour is involved. An errand or movement of an employe, the purpose of which is dominantly personal, May involve a deviation or detour which is made Necessary by the employer's business; and if an injury occurs during such deviation or detour it arises out of and in the course of the employment. In a number of cases we have so held. 1 Confusion has apparently resulted from the application of the dominant-purpose test 2 in Olson v. Trinity Lodge, 226 Minn. 141, 146, 32 N.W.2d 255, 258, wherein we said: 'If a movement on the part of an employe is undertaken from a mixture of motives, the major motive or dominant purpose thereof, as a general rule, controls in determining whether an injury sustained in the course of such movement arises out of and in the course of his employment.'
The authoritative scope of the dominant-purpose rule becomes clear if we keep in mind the controlling facts to which it was applied in the Olson decision. In that case, the employe had but a Single destination, namely, the lodge building, to which he was en route for the two distinct or dual purposes of (1) personally enjoying the comforts of his private rent-free room, and (2) tending the employer's furnace. If either purpose had been eliminated, the trip to the lodge building would, nevertheless, have been made because of the remaining purpose. It therefore became pertinent to ascertain which purpose was dominant. Obviously, the dominant purpose was the employment, in that the cold January weather created an immediate and compelling necessity for tending the furnace, which had not been taken care of since morning. No...
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