William L. Pender, et al. v. Bank of America Corporation, et al.

This petition presents an important unresolved question about a remedial provision of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (“ERISA”) that this Court has addressed no fewer than eight times in recent years. ERISA § 502(a)(3) entitles employee benefit plan participants to “appropriate equitable relief ” for violations of the Act. The Court has repeatedly construed the term “equitable relief ” to mean relief that was traditionally awarded by equity courts applying “the law of equity” during the days of the divided bench. But as the Solicitor General has noted, the Court has not prescribed a framework for determining whether a particular form of equitable relief is “appropriate” in a given case. See Brief for the United States as Amicus Curiae, Sereboff v. Mid-Atlantic Medical Services, Inc. (Feb. 23, 2006) (No. 05-260), p. 27. The question squarely presented by this case is: Whether the word “appropriate” in ERISA § 502(a)(3) authorizes ERISA courts to decline to award an established equitable remedy based on considerations that an equity court in the days of the divided bench would have deemed legally irrelevant for purposes of the specific remedy at issue.