Cite as: 512 U. S. 532 (1994)
Opinion of the Court
such as breach of duty, injury, and causation, with the focus resting on the foreseeability of the plaintiff's injury. Id., at 374-375. In Gottshall, the Third Circuit did at least consider the plaintiff's claim in light of the common law of negligent infliction of emotional distress as part of its factual "genuineness" inquiry. By the time the court next applied the Gottshall genuineness test, however, the common-law aspect of its analysis had completely disappeared; Carlisle's stress-related claim was not evaluated under any of the common-law tests. In Carlisle, the Third Circuit refined its test to two questions—whether there was convincing evidence of the genuineness of the emotional injury claim (with "genuine" meaning authentic and serious), and if there was, whether the injury was foreseeable. If these questions could be answered affirmatively by the court, there was "no bar to recovery under the FELA." 990 F. 2d, at 98.
The Third Circuit's standard is fatally flawed in a number of respects. First, as discussed above, because negligent infliction of emotional distress is not explicitly addressed in the statute, the common-law background of this right of recovery must play a vital role in giving content to the scope of an employer's duty under FELA to avoid inflicting emotional injury. Cf. Monessen, 486 U. S., at 336-339; Buell, supra, at 568-570; Urie, supra, at 182. By treating the common-law tests as mere arbitrary restrictions to be disregarded if they stand in the way of recovery on "meritorious" FELA claims, the Third Circuit put the cart before the horse: The common law must inform the availability of a right to recover under FELA for negligently inflicted emotional distress, so the "merit" of a FELA claim of this type cannot be ascertained without reference to the common law.
Perhaps the court below believed that its focus on the perceived genuineness of the claimed emotional injury adequately addressed the concerns of the common-law courts in dealing with emotional injury claims. But the potential for fraudulent and trivial claims—the concern identified by the
551
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