Hon David Breck’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

1 state decisions

Most-quoted passages

The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 7 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “[w]hile a union may bargain away non-vested retiree benefits in favor of more compensation for active employees, it may not do such with the vested rights of its retirees. At the very least, a reasonable reading of the Memorandum Agreement supports plaintiffs’ interpretation that as “Recipient Employees,” they were promised “the assets remaining in the SET” at the expiration of the seven-year period. By allocating the trust residue to new WCI employees who were not part of the defined class of “Recipient Employees,” material issues of fact clearly exist as to whether defendants breached their § 301 obligations to plaintiffs. 2 On this ground alone, we believe that the district court’s grant of summary judgment to defendants was improper. Plaintiffs ... do not claim ... that they have vested rights to a particular benefit, such as health insurance or life insurance. Rather, plaintiffs are contending that they had a vested right in the distribution of the trust resources solely within the limited, defined named beneficiaries in the Memorandum Agreement. “When the trustees allocated the trust assets to members outside of the Recipient Employees, they infringed on plaintiffs’ vested rights under the agreement.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Williams v. WCI Steel Co.