Faragher v. City of Boca Raton
The Supreme Court ruled that cities and other employers can be held automatically responsible when a supervisor's sexual harassment creates a hostile work environment, unless the employer can show it took reasonable steps to prevent harassment and the employee unreasonably failed to use them.
Because Boca Raton never distributed its anti-harassment policy to the lifeguards involved and gave them no way to bypass the harassing supervisors, the city could not use that defense, and the Court restored the trial court's ruling in the lifeguard's favor.
“We hold that an employer is vicariously liable for actionable discrimination caused by a supervisor, but subject to an affirmative defense looking to the reasonableness of the employer’s conduct as well as that of a plaintiff victim.”
The Court's core holding establishing the new liability framework for supervisor harassment.
How it got here: A federal trial court ruled for Faragher after a bench trial, but the Eleventh Circuit, sitting en banc, reversed and held the City not liable; the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case to resolve circuit disagreement.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Beth Ann Faragher worked as an ocean lifeguard for the City of Boca Raton while in college. Over five years, her supervisors Bill Terry and David Silverman repeatedly touched her and other female lifeguards without consent, made lewd comments, and demeaned women generally. Faragher never made a formal complaint to city officials, though she and other lifeguards mentioned the behavior informally to a lower-level supervisor who did not pass it along.
The question before the Court
If a city lifeguard is sexually harassed by her supervisors for years but never files a formal complaint, can the city still be held responsible?
The Court's answer
Yes — the Court ruled that Boca Raton could be held liable for its supervisors' harassment of Faragher, even though she never filed a formal complaint. Employers are automatically (vicariously) responsible when a supervisor's harassment creates a hostile work environment, but they can raise a defense if they took reasonable steps to prevent and fix harassment and the employee unreasonably failed to use those safeguards.
Boca Raton could not use that defense because it never actually distributed its anti-harassment policy to the lifeguards' section and gave employees no way to report harassment without going through the harassing supervisors themselves. Because the City took no meaningful preventive steps, it could not show it exercised reasonable care, so it was liable as a matter of law despite Faragher's own failure to file a formal complaint.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Employers now have a strong legal incentive to actually distribute anti-harassment policies and provide accessible complaint channels that bypass offending supervisors, because failing to do so can eliminate their only defense to automatic liability. Workers gain a clearer path to holding employers accountable for supervisor harassment even without filing a formal complaint first.
What changes now
This is a final merits decision. The case is remanded to reinstate the District Court's judgment awarding Faragher nominal damages. The ruling establishes the vicarious-liability-plus-affirmative-defense framework that lower courts will now use in future supervisor-harassment cases, alongside the companion decision issued the same day in Burlington Industries v. Ellerth.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide the case on a negligence theory or on whether the City had constructive knowledge of the harassment through a subordinate supervisor's awareness; it resolved the case solely on vicarious liability, leaving those alternative theories unaddressed.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent — Justice Thomas
“Petitioner suffered no adverse employment consequence; thus the Court of Appeals was correct to hold that the city of Boca Raton (City) is not vicariously liable for the conduct of Chief Terry and Lieutenant Silverman.”Thomas's central objection that liability should require a tangible job action.
Justice Thomas argued that, consistent with his dissent in the companion Ellerth case, an employer should not be vicariously liable for a supervisor's hostile-environment harassment absent a tangible adverse employment action, which Faragher did not suffer. He would have upheld the Eleventh Circuit's ruling for the City on vicarious liability and remanded only for further proceedings on a negligence theory, since the City did not necessarily act unreasonably by failing to distribute its policy given the EEOC's guidance at the time.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court applied agency-law principles under Title VII, asking whether a supervisor's harassment could be attributed to the employer even though such conduct usually falls outside a supervisor's authorized duties.
- The Court found that a supervisor's authority over subordinates 'aids' harassment because the agency relationship gives supervisors close, continuous contact with and power over the people they harass, making it harder for victims to resist or report abuse than harassment by a co-worker.
- To reconcile this with the Court's earlier ruling in Meritor that employers are not automatically liable for every supervisor's harassment, the Court adopted a two-part framework: employers are vicariously liable for a hostile environment created by a supervisor, but may raise an affirmative defense when no tangible job action (like firing or demotion) occurred.
- That affirmative defense requires the employer to show it exercised reasonable care to prevent and correct harassment, and that the employee unreasonably failed to take advantage of preventive or corrective opportunities the employer provided.
- Applying this framework, the Court found the City could not meet the first part of the defense because it never distributed its anti-harassment policy to the Marine Safety Section and gave employees no way to complain around the harassing supervisors, so the City was liable as a matter of law.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Meritor Savings Bank, FSB v. Vinson (477 U. S. 57)
The Court builds on Meritor's rule that employers are not automatically liable for all supervisor harassment, refining it into a new framework.