I recently had to research whether Tennessee Supreme Court had expressly recognized the doctrine of “constructive discharge”. The answer is yes.

The doctrine, which is well established under federal law, can generally be described as a claim by an employee that he/she was forced to resign their employment because of intolerable working conditions.

It turns out that Tennessee explicitly adopted the doctrine of constructive discharge a number of years ago. In Campbell v. Florida Steel Corp., 919 S.W.2d 26, 34 (Tenn. 1996), which involved a hostile work environment claim under the Tennessee Human Rights Act, the court held that a plaintiff can establish that they were “constructively discharged” from their employment by “showing that a reasonable employer would have foreseen the employee’s resignation, given the intolerable conditions of employment.” Thus, to establish a constructive discharge claim, the court said that “an employee need only show that the employer knowingly permitted conditions of discrimination in employment so intolerable that a reasonable person subject to them would resign.” Id.