I don’t generally like to play first to post, and would rather wait to see what I can add to the discussion of any particular issue before posting on a breaking story. But as I have been watching and waiting for the Supreme Court’s opinion in the ERISA fiduciary duty case of Beck v. Pace International to be issued, I was quick to read it today when it hit my in box and thought I would pass it along. Hopefully, I will return to it in the next few days – after a hearing tomorrow and a deposition on Wednesday – and talk more about it, because there are some interesting aspects to the Supreme Court’s opinion. In the meantime, here is a quick summary of the opinion from SCOTUSBLOG:

Continuing the pattern of unanimity, the Court ruled in Beck v. PACE International Union (05-1448) that a company that sponsors its own pension plan for workers has no duty to consider merging it with another plan as a method of ending the plan while carrying on the benefits. In this case, the bankruptcy trustee opted to buy an annuity rather than consider merging with an ongoing plan. Justice Antonin Scalia authored the opinion.

You can find the opinion itself here, and some news coverage summing up what the case was about here. My prior posts on the case are here and here.