Wilmington Shipping Co. v. New England Life Insurance

How courts have described this case

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

• ruling that a plan participant can sue for breach of fiduciary duty after plan termination
• holding that ERISA allows beneficiaries to bring an action on behalf of a defunct plan
• holding that “state-law claims [that] merely repackage [an] ERISA claim . . . are preempted by ERISA”
• holding that breach of contract and negligence claims were preempted by ERISA
• reasoning that parties may not avoid the preemptive reach of federal law by recasting otherwise preempted claims as state law contract and tort claims
• upholding preemption where plaintiffs “candidly characterize their state-law claims as ‘alternatives’ to [defendant’s] ERISA claim, a good tip off that they seek the kind of ‘alternate enforcement mechanism[ ]’ that ERISA preempts”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).