Court Opinion

ID: 9482534
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:52:57.567439+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:49:03.020486
License: Public Domain

DUHÉ, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
Because I believe the majority opinion is contrary to our precedent in Rodrigue v. Western & Southern Life Insurance Co.,1 and because I do not believe that the phrase “5 or more years of service” is ambiguous, I respectfully dissent.
The Plan determines Mr. Williams’s benefits according to whether he “had 5 or more years of service at the time the disability commenced.” R. 88-84. Mr. Williams began work with Bridge-stone/Firestone on April 25, 1983. By his own account, his disability commenced on April 12,1988. He had less than five years of service at the time his disability commenced, according to the plain meaning of the Plan.
The majority remands this case to determine whether five years means (1) five years, or (2) five years less accrued, unused vacation time. In that it says that the “courts must base their conclusions on the written instruments,”2 the majority must be holding that the phrase “five years” can have either of those two meanings. When a phrase can have two or more reasonable interpretations, it is ambiguous. E.g., United Paperworkers Int’l Union v. Champion Int’l Corp., 908 F.2d 1252, 1255 (5th Cir.1990). I cannot agree that “five years” is susceptible of two reasonable in*1075terpretations, and I cannot agree that it is ambiguous.
The majority will alter the Plan to read “5 or more years of service, less accrued, unused vacation time,” if the company has been calculating benefits in this way. The majority is estopping the company from following the plain meaning of the Plan because of what the company may have said or done in the past. This holding is contrary to Rodrigue, which by the majority’s own admission, held that the plain meaning of a plan cannot be altered by estoppel principles. At pages 1072-73 (construing Rodrigue v. Western & S. Life Ins. Co., 948 F.2d 969 (5th Cir.1991)).
In my view, the correct result in this case is terribly inequitable. Faced with these difficult facts, the majority has avoided our precedent and hidden its holding that the phrase “5 years” is ambiguous. “Unlike the deconstructionists at the forefront of modern literary [and legal] criticism, the courts [should] still recognize the possibility of an unambiguous text.” Ideal Mut. Ins. Co. v. Last Days Evangelical Ass’n, 783 F.2d 1234, 1238 (5th Cir.1986).
For those reasons, I respectfully dissent.

. At page 1074.

. 948 F.2d 969 (5th Cir.1991).