An appeals court in Pennsylvania has ruled that the state police force must rehire a trooper whom it let go after a female officer obtained a protective order against him which barred him from having a gun. A dissenting judge argued in vain that the dismissal was justified since under the circumstances the man “cannot perform the basic and essential duties for which he was hired as a trooper.” Union grievance arbitration awards, however, get deferential treatment in court afterward, and so it was in this case, in which the arbitrator found it significant that the state had listed other reasons (unbecoming conduct, conformance to laws) for its action. 


Now, there’s nothing to physically prevent the state from complying with this set of marching orders: it is free to go on shelling out a trooper’s salary and benefits at taxpayer expense even while it cannot ask him to perform the duties of his job. Still, it’s close enough to a “sued if you do, sued if you don’t” situation that I filed the story in that department at Overlawyered, a department that also compiles many other curious stories: 

Sometimes courts succeed (expensively, and after the fact) in untangling these conflicts. But wouldn’t it be nice if the law didn’t create so many of them in the first place by trying to reach into so many areas of life?