Court Opinion

ID: 9494845
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:48:26.590049+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:56:39.692307
License: Public Domain

EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge,
concurring in the judgment.
As my colleagues observe, the parties to this case failed to address some potentially important issues: the nature and length of the statute of limitations, whether laches may be invoked to shorten that period, and the source of law (state or federal) used to determine the content of any equitable principles that may be applicable. The only serious debate was whether the district court clearly erred in finding that, when signing a collective bargaining agreement in 1994, Leonhardt relied on Stewart’s statement several years earlier that he had made an audit “go away.” The district judge answered “yes” after a trial, see 139 F.Supp.2d 976 (C.D.Ill.2001). Like my colleagues, I conclude that, if inking the 1994 pact reflects reliance of any kind, it was not reasonable for Leonhardt to have thought that Stewart’s statement relieved Gorman Brothers for all time of the pension and welfare promises contained in the written agreements — and that, unless reliance is reasonable, it does not provide a defense. That conclusion, reached in the final three paragraphs of my colleagues’ opinion, makes it unnecessary for us to address the many issues on which the parties’ briefs are silent. I am reluctant to join an opinion that nonetheless ruminates about them at length.
Choice of law is the first difficulty. My colleagues assume that state law supplies the period of limitations for pension and welfare funds’ collection suits under ERISA and then discuss the equitable doctrines that federal courts apply to shorten or augment a statutory period for suit. That’s an unstable combination. If state law supplies the period of limitations, then it also supplies all related doctrines of tolling and laches. So much is established for other statutes, see Hardin v. Straub, 490 U.S. 536, 109 S.Ct. 1998, 104 L.Ed.2d *886582 (1989); Shropshear v. Chicago, 275 F.3d 598 (7th Cir.2001), and I can’t see any reason for doing things differently here. The majority reserves this question in light of the parties’ failure to address it, but Hardin and similar cases illuminate the path. If state law supplies the period of limitations, we must ask how Illinois handles a laches defense to the enforcement of a written contract, not how a federal court should deal with laches as a matter of first principles. Yet my colleagues’ opinion does not cite any Illinois case or otherwise discuss that state’s application of laches to contract disputes.
Equitable modifications come from state law, however, only if the statute of limitations itself is supplied by state law. Borrowing state statutes of limitations is the norm when federal law is silent, see North Star Steel Co. v. Thomas, 515 U.S. 29, 115 S.Ct. 1927, 132 L.Ed.2d 27 (1995), but that norm comes with a proviso: “when a rule from elsewhere in federal law clearly provides a closer analogy than available state statutes, and when the federal policies at stake and the practicalities of litigation make that rule a significantly more appropriate vehicle for interstitial lawmaking” then federal law supplies the period of limitations. DelCostello v. Teamsters, 462 U.S. 151, 172, 103 S.Ct. 2281, 76 L.Ed.2d 476 (1983), quoted and reaffirmed in North Star, 515 U.S. at 35, 115 S.Ct. 1927. One court of appeals has considered and rejected employers’ contentions that the six-month period from the National Labor Relations Act is the sort of “closer analogy” that should be applied to ERISA collection suits. See Wyoming Laborers Health & Welfare Plan v. Morgen & Oswood Construction Co., 850 F.2d 613 (10th Cir.1988). I agree with that conclusion: the nlea, which is not concerned with debt collection suits, has nothing on state law as a source of limitations under erisa. But erisa itself contains a statute of limitations governing debt-collection suits by multi-employer plans such as our plaintiff, the Teamsters Welfare Trust. That statute is § 4301(f) of erisa (as added by the Multi-Employer Pension Plan Amendments Act of 1980), 29 U.S.C. § 1451(f), which reads:
An action under this section may not be brought after the later of—
(1) 6 years after the date on which the cause of action arose, or
(2) 3 years after the earliest date on which the plaintiff acquired or should have acquired actual knowledge of the existence of such cause of action; except that in the case of fraud or concealment, such action may be brought not later than 6 years after the date of discovery of the existence of such cause of action.
The reference to “this section” comprises Subchapter III, Subtitle D — which is to say, 29 U.S.C. §§ 1361-1453 — because § 1451(a) is the enforcement mechanism for that subtitle, which deals principally with liability by employers that withdraw from multi-employer plans. See Bay Area Laundry Fund v. Ferbar Corp., 522 U.S. 192, 118 S.Ct. 542, 139 L.Ed.2d 553 (1997). Gorman Brothers did not withdraw from the plan; it simply failed to remit in full, so the Trust’s suit is under 29 U.S.C. § 1145 rather than § 1451. Section 1145 does not contain a rule comparable to § 1451(f). But this just poses, and does not answer, the question whether the rule of § 1451(f) is a better fit than a rule drawn from state law. No court of appeals has discussed that question to date.
DelCostello held that the nlra’s period governs hybrid claims that employers violated collective bargaining agreements and that unions violated their duty of fair representation in not preventing the employers’ acts. These hybrid claims are like the unfair labor practices to which the nlra is addressed, the Court held, and limitations rules drawn from state law might complicate federal labor policy, which is supposed *887to be administered without regard to state law. Agency Holding Corp. v. Malley-Duff & Associates, Inc., 483 U.S. 143, 107 S.Ct. 2759, 97 L.Ed.2d 121 (1987), then held that civil actions under rioo are governed by the four-year period in the Clayton Act, because many of Rioo’s provisions have precursors in antitrust law,, and Larwpf, Pleva, Lipkind, Prupis & Petigrow v. Gilbertson, 501 U.S. 350, 111 S.Ct. 2773, 115 L.Ed.2d 321 (1991), Mowed up with a holding that implied rights of action under the federal securities laws must be pursued within the time provided for the express securities rights of action. In all three of these cases a federal statute spoke to the kind of claim under consideration. Just so with collection suits under ERISA by multi-employer pension and welfare plans. Section 1451(f) of erisa deals with collection suits by multi-employer plans. Why not use it for this collection suit by a multi-employer plan? None of the cases collected at slip op. 880, supra applying state law to one or another claim under erisa mentions § 1451(f) — or for that matter discusses the legal analysis of Agency Holding or Law/pf Pleva, a serious omission.
Section 1451(f) may be “a significantly more appropriate vehicle for interstitial lawmaking” for at least two additional reasons. First, erisa contains a sweeping preemption clause. 29 U.S.C. § 1144(a). When judges fill other gaps in erisa, they use federal law, even if this means inventing federal common law. See Franchise Tax Board v. Construction Laborers Vacation Trust, 463 U.S. 1, 24 n. 26, 103 S.Ct. 2841, 77 L.Ed.2d 420 (1983). In both respects erisa is similar to labor law, which also has strong preemption rules accompanied by the creation of federal common law; DelCostello deemed the preemption of state substantive law a strong reason not to obtain periods of limitations from state law. Why, in a complex body of federal pension law, should the statute of limitations be the only bit of state law? Statutes of limitations often are tailored to the substantive rule; to import a body of state limitations law into a field from which all other state tendrils have been excluded makes little sense.
Second, § 1451(f) solves the sort of problem presented by a defense of laches. The six-and-three structure of this rule, like the three-and-one structure of the statute used for securities-fraud claims, is incompatible with equitable tolling. See Lampf, Pleva, 501 U.S. at 363, 111 S.Ct. 2773. Subsection 1451(f)(2) supplies a limit of three years from discovery, which demonstrates that the six-year period in § 1451(f)(1) is a statute of repose; equitable extensions are incompatible with periods of repose, according to Lampf, Pleva, and that message is driven home by the special extension to six years from discovery if fraud is entailed. Courts could not allow for additional equitable extensions without displacing a legislative choice; and if laches is just a mirror image of equitable tolling, then abbreviating the time on account of laches also is inappropriate. This reinforces the principle that courts may not on equitable grounds decline to enforce the terms of an erisa plan. See Bowerman v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 226 F.3d 574, 586 (7th Cir.2000); Frahm v. Equitable Life Assurance Society, 137 F.3d 955 (7th Cir.1998). The parties failed to discuss the language of this plan, but its text permits the Trustees to collect contributions that employers should have made.* *888Any defense based on Stewart’s oral representations would entail a departure from that language. This makes § 1451(f), which knocks out any such equitable defense, a significantly better fit for ERisa collection cases than is a rule drawn from state law that may allow equitable defenses. As we held in Central States Pension Fund v. Gerber Truck Service, Inc., 870 F.2d 1148 (7th Cir.1989) (en banc), a multi-employer pension or welfare trust is not just an ordinary contract, and “ordinary” state contract law that may prevent a plan from enforcing its written terms accordingly is a bad match.
One could imagine a contrary argument: that § 1451(f)’s limitation to suits under Subchapter III, Subtitle D of ERISA reflects a legislative decision that some unusual features of -withdrawal-liability actions require special rules, inappropriate to other suits under § 1145 for delinquent contributions. Both § 1145 and § 1451 were added to erisa by the mppaa in 1980, but they were put in different subchapters. Section 1145 went into a subchapter that had an existing enforcement section (29 U.S.C. § 1132, which lacks a statute of limitations), while Subchapter III, Subtitle D was new and needed an enforcement clause, which § 1451 supplied. Under the circumstances, it makes sense to understand the failure to extend § 1451(f) to other collection suits by multi-employer trusts as an oversight, perhaps reflecting an assumption that § 1132 provided one already. I see no reason to impute to Congress a decision that the six-and-three rule would be inappropriate in any way for other collection suits. Lampf Pleva shows that there is no rule against applying a period of limitations in one section to a claim under a different section of the same statute; to the contrary, in Lanvpf Pleva the Court took the existence of some limitations rules in the Securities Exchange Act as a reason to use federal rather than state law when resolving claims under sections that lacked their own periods of limitations.
As I said at the outset, the parties did not brief these matters. What I have written therefore is provisional, and the questions are open for the day when the parties present them for decision. But at least tentatively I am more attracted to the position that federal law supplies the period of limitations — and that laches is no defense to collection — than I am to a view that state law supplies the period while judges have a free hand to invent a common. law of equitable tolling and laches for erisa collection suits.

 Section 4.5 gives the Trustees "power to demand, collect and receive Employer payments and all other money and property to which the Trustees may be entitled.... They shall take such steps, including the institution and prosecution of, or the intervention in, such legal or administrative proceedings as the Trustees in their sole discretion determine to be in the best interest of the Trust Fund for the purpose of collecting such payments, money and property, without prejudice, how*888ever, to the rights of the Union to take whatever steps it deems necessary and wishes to undertake for such purpose.”