Retirement Security Law Commons^™

Richard Kilgore V. Eleni Kilgore, 135 Nev. Adv. Op. 47 (Oct. 3, 2019), Aariel Williams

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

NRS 286.510 provides that the eligibility depends on an employee spouse’s effective date of membership in Nevada Public Employees’ Retirement System (“PERS”), profession, number of years served, and age. The Court determined that the time does not depend on whether the employee spouse’s PERS account has fully matured. NRS 125.155 provides district courts with discretion to deny or reduce a non-employee spouse’s request for pension payments before the employee spouse’s retirement. Further, under NRS 125.150(3), a party can seek adjudication of an asset mistakenly omitted from the divorce decree within three years of discovering the mistake. The Court determined that …

The Venue Shuffle: Forum Selection Clauses & Erisa, Christine P. Bartholomew, James A. Wooten

Journal Articles

Forum selection clauses are ubiquitous. Historically, the judiciary was hostile to contracts limiting a plaintiff’s venue options. The tide has since turned. Today, lower courts routinely enforce such clauses. This Article challenges this reflexive response in the special context of ERISA cases. It mines ERISA’s statutory text, rich legislative history, and historical context to supply an in-depth exploration of ERISA’s unique policy goal of providing employees “ready access to the Federal courts.” The Article then explains how forum selection clauses undermine this goal and thus should be invalid under controlling Supreme Court jurisprudence.

Reforming Pensions While Retaining Shareholder Voice, David H. Webber

Faculty Scholarship

Public pension and labor union funds have been the driving force in diversified shareholder activism. They have also fended off attacks on jobs and proactively created jobs for fund contributors. These funds currently represent almost $4 trillion in assets over which workers have substantial control. That worker control - and the collective nature of defined benefit pension plans - is the necessary precondition for their shareholder activism. Both worker control and collective investment are directly threatened by the rise of defined contribution funds, particularly by well-funded efforts to promote the 401(k) in the public sector, the last bastion of the …

Cutting Pension Rights For Public Workers: Don't Look To The Courts For Help, Ronald H. Rosenberg

Faculty Publications

Every day we rely on public employees to provide us with a broad range of services necessary to daily life. These workers include public school teachers, fire and police, emergency medical technicians, park rangers, nurses just to name a few. As public employees, these people work for local and state government and they are compensated by us for their services through the taxes we pay. In general, these are modestly paid workers who also receive pensions when they retire after many years of work. Following the financial crisis of 2008-2009, government retirement trust funds significantly lost value and their long-term …

Behavioral Finance, Decumulation, And The Regulatory Strategy For Robo-Advice, Tom Baker, Benedict Dellaert

All Faculty Scholarship

This working paper surveys the decumulation services offered by investment robo-advisors as a case study with which to examine regulatory and market structure issues raised by automated financial advice. We provide a short introduction to decumulation, describing some of the uncertainties involved in identifying optimal decumulation strategies and sketching a few of the ‘rules of thumb’ that financial advisors have developed in this area in the face of this uncertainty. Next we describe behavioral effects that could inhibit consumers from following an optimal decumulation strategy, concluding that, left to their own devices, consumers are likely to make sub-optimal decumulation decisions. …

State Automatic Enrollment Iras After The Trump Election: Are They Preempted By Erisa?, Kathryn L. Moore

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

In recent years, a number of states have sought to close the retirement savings funding gap by enacting legislation mandating that employers that do not sponsor a voluntary pension plan for their employees automatically enroll their employees in a state-administered IRA program. This Article focuses on the most serious legal challenge these programs face: ERISA preemption.

The Article begins by providing an overview of the state automatic enrollment IRA programs. It then discusses a regulatory safe harbor created for these programs in 2016 and disapproved under the Congressional Review Act in 2018. It then turns to the question whether, in …