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- Title
An Agency Costs Theory of Employee Benefit Plan Law.
- Authors
Muir, Dana M.
- Abstract
Courts have long tried to force employee benefit plan relationships into the pigeonholes of donative trust law. Scholars have bemoaned the results. In Thole v. U.S. Bank, the Supreme Court recently perverted bedrock fiduciary principles when it held that pension plan participants did not have standing to bring fiduciary claims alleging violations of prudence and loyalty associated with self-dealing and the loss of almost $750 million in plan assets. It is past time to bring a new lens to bear on the challenges of building plan governance mechanisms that will enable U.S. workers to accumulate the financial resources they need for a secure retirement and decrease the social safety net costs of supporting superannuated individuals. This Article breaks new ground by building an agency costs model to conceptualize the relationship between benefit plan sponsors and plan participants. The model enables normative insights on how governance mechanisms may mitigate agency costs. It also illuminates how these normative insights can be used to improve positive law.
- Subjects
EMPLOYEE benefit laws; AGENCY costs; UNITED States. Supreme Court; POSITIVE law; RETIREMENT
- Publication
Berkeley Journal of Employment & Labor Law, 2022, Vol 43, Issue 2, p361
- ISSN
1067-7666
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.15779/Z380Z22J3W