Opinion ID: 1862119
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: specific principles of erisa pre-emption

Text: ¶ 16. The primary objective of ERISA is to protect employees from the mismanagement of funds set aside to finance employee benefits and pensions by establishing a comprehensive regulatory scheme that required employers to fulfill certain reporting, disclosure and fiduciary duties. Massachusetts v. Morash, 490 U.S. 107, 115 (1989). ERISA is expressly concerned [with] `reporting, disclosure, fiduciary responsibility and the like.' Dillingham, 519 U.S. at 330 (citing Travelers, 514 U.S. at 661). ¶ 17. Section 514(a) of ERISA provides that it shall supersede. . .all State laws insofar as they. . .relate to any employee benefit plan. 29 U.S.C. § 1144(a). Even though this language may appear at first glance to be clear and unambiguous, over the nearly 20 years the United States Supreme Court has looked at ERISA pre-emption, it concluded that the pre-emption provision is not a model of legislative drafting. John Hancock Mut. Life Ins. Co. v. Harris Trust and Sav. Bank, 510 U.S. 86, 99 (1993) (citing Pilot Life Ins. Co. v. Dedeaux, 481 U.S. 41, 46 (1987)). The term relate to is decidedly indeterminate; it does not limit ERISA pre-emption in any material way because really, universally, relations stop nowhere. Travelers, 514 U.S. at 655 (quoting H. James, Roderick Hudson xli (New York ed., World's Classics 1980)). ¶ 18. Early ERISA pre-emption cases interpreted the phrase relate to literally, pre-empting state laws that had a clear `connection with or reference to' employee benefit plans. De Buono, 520 U.S. at 813 (quoting Shaw v. Delta Air Lines, Inc., 463 U.S. 85, 96-97 (1983)). Where state laws do not have an express reference to ERISA, the Court was left with attempting to determine the scope of the term connection with. [T]his still leaves us to question whether the [state] laws have a connection with the ERISA plans, and here an uncritical literalism is no more help than in trying to construe relate to. For the same reasons that infinite relations cannot be the measure of preemption, neither can infinite connections. We simply must go beyond the unhelpful text and the frustrating difficulty of defining its key term, and look instead to the objectives of the ERISA statute as a guide to the scope of the state law that Congress understood would survive. Travelers, 514 U.S. at 656 (emphasis added). ¶ 19. One objective of ERISA is evident from the same section that sets forth the scope of ERISA preemption, § 514, namely, that ERISA is not to be construed to alter, amend, modify, invalidate, impair or supersede any other federal law. 29 U.S.C. § 1144(d). Correspondingly, Congress did not intend that ERISA pre-empt state law that follows from federal law or that federal law encourages. Dillingham, 519 U.S. at 330; Travelers, 514 U.S. at 665-67; Shaw, 463 U.S. at 100-102. Such pre-emption would, in effect, supersede federal law in violation of § 514(d) of ERISA. Shaw, 463 U.S. at 100-102; see also Metropolitan Life Ins. Co. v. Massachusetts, 471 U.S. 724, 744 n.21 (1985)(Congress did not intend ERISA to pre-empt state minimum mental health benefits law in part due to the federal McCarran-Ferguson Act that reserves insurance regulation to the States).