Court Refuses To Vacate ERISA Ruling

An ERISA plaintiff was granted summary judgment in a long-term disability case in the amount of $90,000. Now that the parties have settled the matter the insurance company asked the court to vacate the previous ruling and the opinions and judgments that followed. In the past it has been only under extraordinary circumstances that vacatur has been granted and it has been upheld many times that vacatur being part of a settlement does not mandate that a ruling be vacated.

According to the opinion authored by Judge Moon, "Judicial precedents are presumptively correct and valuable to the legal community as a whole. They are not merely the property of private litigants and should stand unless a court concludes the public interest would be served by vacatur."

Moon denied the motion to vacate, ruling that the "integrity of the judiciary and conserving judicial resources outweighs [the] defendant's private interest in vacating the court's opinions and orders."

Check out the full opinion for the nitty-gritty legal stuff.