Justice HECHT delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Chief Justice JEFFERSON, Justice WAINWRIGHT, Justice MEDINA, Justice GREEN, Justice WILLETT, Justice GUZMAN, and Justice LEHRMANN joined.

Generally, traveling home from work is not in the "course and scope of employment" as defined by the Texas Workers' Compensation Act.1 But is traveling from one workplace to another while on the way home? The court of appeals answered no.2 We disagree.

Petitioner Liana Leordeanu, a pharmaceutical sales representative officing out of her northwest Austin apartment, drove her company car to business appointments in Bastrop some forty miles southeast, then back to a south Austin restaurant for dinner with clients. Afterward, her route home took her past a company-provided self-storage unit, adjacent her apartment complex, in which she kept drug samples and marketing materials. She intended to stop at the unit and empty her car of business supplies in preparation for an out-of-town personal trip the next day. But midway there, she ran off the highway and was seriously injured.

Respondent, American Protection Insurance Company, denied Leordeanu's claim for workers' compensation. The Texas Department of Insurance Workers' Compensation Commission Division upheld APIC's decision, concluding that Leordeanu was not in the course and scope of employment at the time of her accident, and she appealed. A jury found to the contrary, and the trial court rendered judgment on their verdict for Leordeanu. A divided court of appeals reversed and rendered judgment for APIC, holding that there was no evidence to support the verdict.3

The 1917 enactment of the Texas Workers' Compensation Act defined a compensable injury—one "sustained in the course of employment"—to include

The definition had two components: the injury had to (1) relate to or originate in, and (2) occur in the furtherance of, the employer's business. Both had to be satisfied.5

The Act did not require that an employee be injured on the employer's premises. Cases applying the Act concluded that work-required travel is in the course of employment,6 but not, as a general rule, travel between home and work. An employee's travel to and from work makes employment possible and thus furthers the employer's business, satisfying the second component of the definition, but such travel cannot ordinarily be said to originate in the business, the requirement of the first component, because "[t]he risks to which employees are exposed while traveling to and from work are shared by society as a whole and do not arise as a result of the work of employers."7 We have explained it this way:

Chief Justice Calvert referred to the exclusion of travel between work and home from the course and scope of employment as the "coming and going rule"9 and noted that the case law had recognized several exceptions.10

Another rule that developed in the case law is this: an employee traveling for both business and personal purposes is in the course and scope of employment only if the business purpose is both a necessary and sufficient cause for the travel. This "dual purpose" rule was explained by Chief Judge Cardozo in Marks' Dependents v. Gray, as follows:

We indicated our approval of the rule in a 1944 case.12

In 1957, the Legislature codified the "coming and going" rule and its exceptions in one sentence, and the "dual purpose" rule in another sentence,13 and placed both in a new section of the Act as follows:

Then in 1989, the Legislature rewrote this provision and the 1917 general definition, and combined them in a single section of the Act.15 The result, with minor edits in 1993,16 is now section 401.011(12) of the Texas Labor Code, which states:

In the parlance of insurance policies, the general definition describes coverage, and travel must meet both its components to be in the course and scope of employment.18 Subsections (A) and (B) are exclusions, each followed by exceptions. Subsection (A) has three, disjunctive exceptions; if any one is met, the exclusion does not apply, and travel to and from work is not excluded from the course and scope of employment. Subsection (B) has two, conjunctive exceptions and applies unless both are met. Subsection (B) is somewhat convoluted. More simply put, it does not exclude work-required travel from the course and scope of employment merely because the travel also furthers the employee's personal interests that would not, alone, have caused him to make the trip.

Although the Act was completely overhauled in 1989, the operative language of section 401.011(12) largely tracks the 1917 definition of course of employment and the 1957 provision codifying the two travel rules. The revisions to those provisions appear to have been attempts at clarification rather than substantive changes. But the 1957 statute's statement of the two travel rules, in two sentences one after the other, gave no indication of any relationship between them, while section 401.011(12)'s rewrite, listing them as two disjunctive exclusions, can be read to suggest that travel is excluded from the course and scope of employment if either one applies. The difficulty with this construction is that travel between work and home is just one kind of dual-purpose travel, benefitting both employer and employee. If both subsections (A) and (B) apply in every situation, (A) becomes merely a specialized application of (B).

The two rules did not develop that way in the case law. The "dual purpose" rule was devised for the distinct situation in which the employee is traveling between work and a place other than home. In Marks, for example, the employee was injured en route to a nearby town to meet his wife, who was visiting relatives. His employer had given him a "trifling" job to do while there, but Marks would not have gone for that reason alone, nor would he have cancelled had his employer said never mind.19 The court held that he was not injured in the course and scope of employment, making no mention of the "coming and going" rule.20 In each of the two cases in which we have applied subsection (B), Davis v. Argonaut Southwest Insurance Co.21 and Jecker v. Western Alliance Insurance Co.,22 the employee had left work to travel out-of-town for both business and personal reasons and was killed in a car accident on the return trip.23 In both cases, we held that there was evidence to support jury findings that the deaths were compensable under the "dual purpose" rule.24 The "coming and going" rule developed separately, specifically for travel between home and work.25

If the "dual purpose" rule also applied to travel to and from work, homeward-bound travel could never be in the course and scope of employment. It could satisfy subsection (A) and both components of the general definition, but it could never meet subsection (B)(ii). Subsection (B)(ii) excepts dual-purpose travel from the exclusion only if it would not have been made had it not furthered a business purpose. But any employee intending to take care of business on the way home, if the business purpose evaporates, will still go home. Subsection (A) provides that travel home from work may be in the course and scope of employment if the employer furnishes, pays for, or controls the means of transportation, or directs the employee to proceed from one place to another along the way—in short, if the travel furthers the employer's interest. But if subsection (B)(ii) cannot be satisfied, if the employee would further his own interest26 by going home regardless of whether subsection (A)(I)-(iii) applied, the travel could not be in the course and scope of employment. Applying subsection (B)(ii) to employees coming home from work limits subsection (A) to a "going" rule.

That is the problem in the case at hand. The court of appeals held that there was no evidence to support the jury's finding that Leordeanu was injured in the course and scope of her employment, reasoning that subsection (B) applied and (B)(ii) was not met. Leordeanu testified that after she left her business dinner, she intended to stop by her storage unit to unload business supplies from her car, then go to her apartment. The storage unit, she stated, was adjacent her apartment complex, and the route from the restaurant to the storage unit was identical to the route home, except that her apartment was a stone's throw farther. This schematic depicts her travel—

— where R represents the restaurant, A-1 the accident site, and S.U. the storage unit. The court of appeals reasoned:

The court of appeals noted that in St. Paul Fire & Marine Insurance Co. v. Confer,28 a sister court had reached a different conclusion in a similar situation. There, Dr. Confer left work intending to stop by a computer store for supplies on the way home, but he was killed in a car wreck before he reached the store. The opinion in the case is somewhat confused, stating initially that "in order to travel to [the store], it would have been necessary for Dr. Confer to deviate from his normal route home",29 and later that the store "happen[ed] to be along the same route as his route home" so that he was not "forc[ed] ... to travel away from his regular route [home]".30 From the opinion's turn by turn description of his normal route, it appears that while the store was on a route home, that route was not his usual one or the most direct. Going to the store required a slight deviation from his normal route, and the accident occurred before he reached that point. Schematically, Confer's intended travel was as follows—

—where A-2 is the accident site. The court divided his trip into two segments, office-to-store and store-to-home, and concluded that the first, on which he was injured, was in the course and scope of employment because he was on a business errand.31 The court also reasoned that if Confer had been injured after diverging from his normal route but before reaching the store, at site A-3 in the following schematic—

—he would clearly have been in the course and scope of employment, since that part of the trip would have been made solely for business reasons. "Why should the result be any different" at A-2 or A-3, the court asked.32

Two reasons, answered the court of appeals in the present case:

In sum, because the Legislature said so. But that answer begs the question whether the Legislature really intended by section 401.011(12)(B) a result that is certainly peculiar, if not perverse. Confer's travel at site A-3 would not have been excluded from the course and scope of his employment by the statute because (B)(i) and (ii) would both be satisfied: (i) he would have been there even if he had not been going home, because of his business errand, and (ii), he would not have been there but for the errand. Yet to get to A-3, he had to pass A-2, where he would have been, even without a business purpose, because he was going home no matter what, and therefore condition (ii) would not have been met.

Though the court of appeals' answer to Confer's rhetorical question is unsatisfactory, its criticism of Confer's analysis has weight. Dividing Confer's intended work-to-store-to-home trip into a work-to-store business segment followed by a store-to-home personal segment does not leave him with a single, business purpose at point A-2. However you slice it, when the accident occurred, Confer had two concurrent purposes: to run a business errand and to go home. If he had had no errand to run, he would still have made the same trip to the accident site on his way home, just as he usually did. Thus, subsection (B)(ii) cannot be satisfied by dissection.

And if it could, the court of appeals continued, there would be no need for the "dual purpose" rule at all.

This overstates the case. The "dual purpose" rule would still have application in the situations for which it was devised, cases like Marks, Davis, and Jecker, where the employee was not headed home but to another destination, both on business and for pleasure. But the overstatement highlights what we think is the real problem: the application of the "dual purpose" rule to "coming and going" travel.

Under the "dual purpose" rule, Leordeanu's travel from her last appointment in Bastrop to the restaurant would also have been outside the course and scope of employment if, had the business dinner cancelled, she would have continued on to the storage unit and home. Indeed, had she arranged her business calls so that all were along the route home—

—even an accident at site A-4 would be excluded from the course and scope of employment if she would have continued home had her appointments at Call-2, Call-3, and R cancelled. This would not be a reasonable application of section 401.011(12).35

Rather, we hold that only subsection (A) applies to travel to and from the place of employment,36 and that subsection (B) applies to other dual-purpose travel. This is consistent with the historical development of the "coming and going" and "dual purpose" rules, their application in our cases, and the reasonable results they were designed to achieve.

It is undisputed that Leordeanu was driving a car provided by her employer at the time of her accident and therefore excepted from the "coming and going" rule by subsection (A)(i). APIC argues that there is no evidence of the first element of the general definition in section 401.011(12)—that Leordeanu's travel at the time of her injury "ha[d] to do with and originate[d] in the work, business, trade, or profession of [her] employer"— because she was simply on her way home from work. But leaving aside the fact that she officed at home and intended to do some paperwork there before retiring for the night,37 Leordeanu was also on her way from an employer-sponsored dinner to an employer-provided storage facility to empty her company car of business supplies. APIC cites no authority suggesting that such activity was not work-related, and we hold it was. As for the second element of the definition—that at the time of her injury, Leordeanu was "engaged in or about the furtherance of the affairs or business of [her] employer"—APIC concedes that "there was evidence of one or more work purposes to the trip" and that "[a]part from the ["dual purpose" rule], she would satisfy the `furtherance' requirement."38 Thus, there was evidence to support the jury's verdict that Leordeanu was injured in the course and scope of employment. APIC's challenge to the legal sufficiency of the evidence to support the verdict fails.

Accordingly, we reverse the judgment of the court of appeals and affirm the judgment of the trial court.

Justice JOHNSON filed a dissenting opinion.

Justice JOHNSON, dissenting.

Workers' compensation statutes are construed liberally in favor of workers. In re Poly-America, L.P., 262 S.W.3d 337, 350 (Tex.2008). But construing statutes liberally does not mean effectively adding language to them to alter their meaning, which is what the Court does today. I dissent.

For an employee's injury to be compensable under the Texas Workers' Compensation Act, the injury must arise out of and be in the course and scope of the employee's employment. TEX. LAB. CODE § 401.011(10). The Act specifically excludes some injuries during travel from being in the course and scope of employment:

The term ["course and scope of employment"] does not include:

Id. § 401.011(12). Simplified, the definition specifies that the term "course and scope of employment" does not include "(A) transportation to and from the place of employment [with exceptions]; or (B) travel by the employee in the furtherance of the affairs or business of the employer if the travel is also in furtherance of personal or private affairs of the employee unless [both (B)(i) and (B)(ii) are satisfied]." (Emphasis added) The Court concludes that subsection (A) applies to travel to and from the place of employment and subsection (B) applies to other dual purpose travel. 330 S.W.3d 239. Under the Court's construction of the statute, "course and scope of employment" does not include "(A) transportation to and from the place of employment [with exceptions]; or, in dual-purpose travel activities other than those specified in (A), (B) travel by the employee in the furtherance of the affairs or business of the employer if the travel is also in furtherance of personal or private affairs of the employee unless [both (B)(i) and (B)(ii) are satisfied]."

The Court reaches its conclusion by improperly reading words into the statute that the Legislature did not include. See City of Rockwall v. Hughes, 246 S.W.3d 621, 631 (Tex.2008) ("[C]hanging the meaning of [a] statute by adding words to it, we believe, is a legislative function, not a judicial function."). It does so by noting that the Act's "listing [401.011(12)(A) and (B)] as two disjunctive exclusions, can be read to suggest that travel is excluded from the course and scope of employment if either applies." 330 S.W.3d at 244. In my view, the statute not only "suggests" that travel is excluded from the course and scope of employment if either (A) or (B) applies, it plainly says so.

The court of appeals concluded that the statute declines to adopt the policy of allowing coverage when there is any business-related component to travel and mandates a different result for dual purpose travel. 278 S.W.3d at 881, 889. The court explained that a policymaker could come to the conclusion that dual purpose travel is compensable only if it is predominately for a business-related purpose. Id. The Court appears to downplay the court of appeals' reasoning by summarizing the appeals court's interpretation of the straightforward statutory language as being "[i]n sum, because the Legislature said so." 330 S.W.3d 239. But when courts interpret statutory language, they should take that language as it is written. See Seay v. Hall, 677 S.W.2d 19, 25 (Tex.1984) ("[I]t would be a usurpation of our powers to add language to a law where the legislature has refrained."); Simmons v. Arnim, 110 Tex. 309, 220 S.W. 66, 70 (Tex. 1920) ("[Courts] are not the law-making body. They are not responsible for omissions in legislation."). Courts generally presume the Legislature said what it meant, and that the Legislature's omission of words was intentional. See Entergy Gulf States, Inc. v. Summers, 282 S.W.3d 433, 437 (Tex.2009) ("Where [statutory] text is clear, text is determinative of [Legislative] intent."); Cameron v. Terrell & Garrett, Inc., 618 S.W.2d 535, 540 (Tex.1981); Mauzy v. Legislative Redistricting Bd., 471 S.W.2d 570, 572 (Tex.1971); see Tex. & N.O.R. Co. v. Tex. R.R. Comm'n, 145 Tex. 541, 200 S.W.2d 626, 629 (Tex.1947). Courts should only read words into a statute when those words are necessary to effect clear legislative intent or are implicit in the statute, or when the statute yields a nonsensical or absurd result absent the words. See Laidlaw Waste Sys. (Dallas), Inc. v. City of Wilmer, 904 S.W.2d 656, 659 (Tex.1995) ("[C]ourts should not insert words in a statute except to give effect to clear legislative intent."); Lee v. City of Houston, 807 S.W.2d 290, 294-95 (Tex. 1991) ("A court may not judicially amend a statute and add words that are not implicitly contained in the language of the statute."); Jones v. Liberty Mut. Ins. Co., 745 S.W.2d 901, 902 (Tex.1988) (same).

The words the Court adds by "construction" are not implicit in the statute. Further, the court of appeals' opinion properly interprets the statute as the Legislature wrote it, effects the Legislature's intent as embodied in the language used, and demonstrates that construing the statute as it is written does not yield a nonsensical or absurd result.

I agree with the court of appeals that the dual purpose rule applies to Leordeanu's claim and her injury is not in the course and scope of her employment. For the reasons set out by the court of appeals, I would affirm its judgment.