The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has recently had to delve into several questions about what it means to be self-employed or an independent contractor for workers’ compensation purposes, and that led some of the justices Wednesday to question whether the General Assembly had passed faulty legislation.

“Is this a problem with the statute? Why do we have so much trouble, and why do we need so many court-created tests?” Chief Justice Thomas Saylor asked early on in the argument session in A Special Touch v. Department of Labor and Industry. The argument session was set to focus on what constitutes “self-employment” for the purposes of the Unemployment Compensation Law, which does not explicitly define the term.