# Montanile v. Board of Trustees of Nat. Elevator Industry Health Benefit Plan

> Supreme Court of the United States · January 20, 2016 · 25 Fla. L. Weekly Fed. S 600

URL: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9821184

## Case

- **Full name:** Robert MONTANILE, Petitioner v. BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF the NATIONAL ELEVATOR INDUSTRY HEALTH BENEFIT PLAN.
- **Court:** Supreme Court of the United States
- **Decided:** January 20, 2016
- **Citations:** 25 Fla. L. Weekly Fed. S 600; 577 U.S. 136; 84 U.S.L.W. 4046; 61 Employee Benefits Cas. (BNA) 1165; 136 S. Ct. 651; 193 L. Ed. 2d 556; 2016 U.S. LEXIS 843
- **Precedential status:** Published
- **Opinion:** Dissent by Ginsburg
- **Judges:** Ginsburg, Thomas
- **Cited by:** 201 later opinions in the Frix Law Library

## Citator (automated)

- No negative treatment found by the automated citator. That is not the same as a confirmation that the case is good law; read the citing cases.
- Full citator and citing cases: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9821184

## How later opinions describe it (automated extraction)

- reasoning that recovery from general assets was not equitable and remanding to determine “whether [Defendant] kept his settlement fund separate from his general assets or dissipated the entire fund on nontraceable assets”
- holding that a plan fiduciary may not recover expenses under § 502(a)(3) from a “participant’s remaining assets” when the participant has already spent any recoverable funds “on nontraceable items”
- holding that the interpretation of equitable relief in Mertens and Great-West remains unchanged and “when a participant dissipates the whole settlement on nontraceable items, the fiduciary cannot bring a suit to attach the participant's general assets under § 502(a)(3
- concluding that recovery out of “[a] defendant’s expenditure of the entire identifiable fund on nontraceable items (like food or travel) . . . is a legal remedy, not an equitable one”
- describing “a personal claim against the wrongdoer” as “a quintessential action at constructive trust case the defendant has legal rights in something that in good conscience belongs to the plaintiff. The property is ‘subject to a constructive trust.’”

## Opinion text

Justice GINSBURG, dissenting.
Montanile received a $500,000 settlement out of which he had pledged to reimburse his health benefit plan for expenditures on his behalf of at least $121,044.02. See ante, at 655 - 656. He can escape that reimbursement obligation, the Court decides, by spending the settlement funds rapidly on nontraceable items. See ante, at 658 - 659. What brings the Court to that bizarre conclusion? As developed in my dissenting opinion in Great-West Life & Annuity Ins. Co. v. Knudson, 534 U.S. 204 , 224-234, 122 S.Ct. 708 , 151 L.Ed.2d 635 (2002), the Court erred profoundly in that case by reading the work product of a Congress sitting in 1974 as "unravel[ling] forty years of fusion of law and equity, solely by employing the benign sounding word 'equitable' when authorizing 'appropriate equitable relief.' " Langbein, What ERISA Means by "Equitable": The Supreme Court's Trail of Error in Russell, Mertens, and Great-West, 103 Colum. L. Rev. 1317 , 1365 (2003). The Court has been persuasively counseled "to confess its error." Ibid. I would not perpetuate Great-West 's mistake, and would therefore affirm the judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
Justice ALITO joins this opinion, except for Part III-C.

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Source: Frix Law Library, https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9821184. Public record. Not legal advice.