Cite as: 524 U. S. 775 (1998)
Opinion of the Court
(1949) ("The liability of a master to a third person for the torts of a servant has been widely extended by aid of the elastic phrase 'scope of the employment' which may be used to include all which the court wishes to put into it"). Older cases, for example, treated smoking by an employee during working hours as an act outside the scope of employment, but more recently courts have generally held smoking on the job to fall within the scope. Prosser & Keeton, supra, at 504, and n. 23. It is not that employers formerly did not authorize smoking but have now begun to do so, or that employees previously smoked for their own purposes but now do so to serve the employer. We simply understand smoking differently now and have revised the old judgments about what ought to be done about it.
The proper analysis here, then, calls not for a mechanical application of indefinite and malleable factors set forth in the Restatement, see, e. g., §§ 219, 228, 229, but rather an enquiry into the reasons that would support a conclusion that harassing behavior ought to be held within the scope of a supervisor's employment, and the reasons for the opposite view. The Restatement itself points to such an approach, as in the commentary that the "ultimate question" in determining the scope of employment is "whether or not it is just that the loss resulting from the servant's acts should be considered as one of the normal risks to be borne by the business in which the servant is employed." Id., § 229, Comment a. See generally Taber v. Maine, 67 F. 3d 1029, 1037 (CA2 1995) ("As the leading Torts treatise has put it, 'the integrating principle' of respondeat superior is 'that the employer should be liable for those faults that may be fairly regarded as risks of his business, whether they are committed in furthering it or not' " (quoting 5 F. Harper, F. James, & O. Gray, Law of Torts § 26.8, pp. 40-41 (2d ed. 1986))).
In the case before us, a justification for holding the offensive behavior within the scope of Terry's and Silverman's employment was well put in Judge Barkett's dissent: "[A]
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