State Employees' Ass'n of New Hampshire, Inc. v. Belknap County

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding that state retirement system statute granted eligible governmental employees an enforceable right to benefits and constituted an implicit waiver of sovereign immunity as to suits seeking to recover those benefits
• noting that, under the doctrine of anticipatory breach, a plaintiff may elect to bring suit at any time between the other party’s stated intention to breach the contract and the date that the other party actually becomes obligated to perform a specific duty under the contract
• “[Retirement] benefits constitute a substantial part of an employee’s compensation and become vested upon the commencement of permanent employee status.”
• waiver of sovereign opportunity implied because legislature gave employees vested right to pension and must provide an “appropriate remedy” to enforce this right
• “existence of a right... implies the existence of an appropriate remedy for recovering [pursuant thereto]”
• court has authority under declaratory judgment act to declare rights and obligations of parties

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).