fellow-servant rule

Also found in: Legal.

fel′low-serv′ant rule`

the common-law rule that the employer is not liable to an employee for injuries resulting from the negligence of a fellow employee (fel′low serv′ant).

References in periodicals archive ?

When faced with the unprecedented phenomenon of injured workers suing their employers for compensation, nineteenth-century judges in England and the United States constructed a trilogy of employer defenses that severely limited employers' liability: voluntary assumption of risk, the fellow-servant rule, and contributory negligence.

Jamie L. Bronstein, Caught in the Machinery: Workplace Accidents and Injured Workers in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Examining more than 70 different rules, ranging from courts permitting contingency-fee contracts to resisting the adoption of the fellow-servant rule, Karsten identifies 29 rules that constituted judicial innovation, but surprisingly, these innovations overwhelmingly favored plaintiffs and the poor, rather than corporations.