MetLife v. Glenn

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Authorship: This page is maintained by Stanford student Barbara Thomas.

Contents

[edit] Briefs and Documents

Docket: 06-923

Issue: Whether an ERISA plan administrator that both evaluates and pays claims operates under a conflict of interest that must be weighed on judicial review of benefit determinations.

Argument Transcript

Certiorari stage

Merits briefs (via ABA)

Amicus briefs

[edit] Pre-Argument Articles

Under the Employment Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), participants in employee benefit plans may bring suit in federal court to compel the payment of improperly withheld benefits. But while ERISA expressly grants federal courts jurisdiction to review the denial of employee benefits by a plan administrator or fiduciary, it does not specify what standard should govern that review. In Firestone Tire and Rubber Co. v. Bruch, the Supreme Court held that, if an administrator has been given discretion “to determine eligibility for benefits” under the terms of the benefit plan in question, federal courts can overturn eligibility determinations only if they find that the administrator has abused its discretion. In passing, the Court noted that such deferential abuse-of-discretion review might be more difficult to survive if the plan administrator’s objectivity were called into question: in a case involving “an administrator or fiduciary who is operating under a conflict of interest, that conflict must be weighed as a ‘facto[r] in determining whether there is an abuse of discretion.’” '

In MetLife Insurance Co. v. Glenn, the Court will, after nearly twenty years, answer two fundamental questions that flow from Firestone’s brief reference to conflicts of interest: First, what constitutes such a conflict, or, more particularly with regard to the MetLife case, is such a conflict created when the same company both administers and funds a benefit plan? Second, when such a conflict does exist, how is it to be factored into a court’s review of an administrator’s denial of benefits?

[edit] Background

Respondent Wanda Glenn worked as an employee of Sears, Roebuck, and Company for approximately fourteen years, beginning in 1986. During that time, Glenn suffered from the increasingly serious effects of a heart condition ultimately diagnosed as cardiomyopathy. In 2000, after observing that Glenn’s heart condition continued to worsen, cardiologist Rajendra Patel advised her that the physical and psychological stress associated with her job were complicating her illness, and suggested that she cease working. Glenn left her job and applied for disability benefits under Sears’s employee insurance plan, which was administered and funded by petitioner MetLife.

Under the terms of the benefit plan, Glenn was eligible for two initial years of benefit payments if she could demonstrate that she was no longer able to perform the central functions of her job with Sears. After reviewing documentation submitted by Dr. Patel, MetLife determined that Glenn had made the required demonstration and approved her claim. MetLife also encouraged Glenn to apply for disability benefits from the Social Security Administration, procuring an attorney to assist her. After the SSA formally determined that Glenn was disabled and thus entitled to regular benefit payments, as well as a retroactive payment for the previous two months, MetLife reduced its own payments to Glenn by the amount of her SSA benefits. Glenn was also instructed to remit her retroactive SSA benefits to MetLife to offset the cost of the benefits she had already received from Sears’s plan.

After she had received benefits from Sears’s plan for two years, Glenn was required by the terms of the plan to make a further showing to justify her continued receipt of disability payments: she had to demonstrate to MetLife that she was, because of her disability, incapable of holding any job for which she was qualified. Glenn submitted additional reports from Dr. Patel in which he opined that the psychological stress from even a sedentary job would cause Glenn’s heart condition to worsen, and so should be avoided. MetLife appointed its own medical specialist to review Glenn’s file—although not to examine her physically—and ultimately denied Glenn’s application on the ground that Glenn was physically capable of performing sedentary work, and that no evidence supported the contention that the psychological stress of working would exacerbate her condition.

Glenn brought an ERISA claim against MetLife in 2002, alleging that the company had wrongfully denied her benefits. The district court ruled against Glenn, finding that MetLife had not abused its discretion in denying her claim, and Glenn appealed to the Sixth Circuit.

The court of appeals overturned MetLife’s decision. After acknowledging that MetLife’s decisions were entitled to a deferential standard of review because MetLife was a plan administrator with discretionary authority, the court expressed concern that MetLife was operating under the “conflict of interest that results when . . . the plan administrator who decides whether an employee is eligible for benefits is also obligated to pay those benefits.” In the court’s view, it was “entitled to take” that conflict “into account” when evaluating the reasonableness of MetLife’s decision to deny Glenn’s claim. Having determined that MetLife’s conflict of interest would serve as one factor weighing against affirmance of the company’s decision, the court went on to find that MetLife had acted “arbitrar[ily] and capricious[ly]” in denying Glenn’s claim. While MetLife had justified the denial by referring to a report in which Dr. Patel had deemed Glenn physically capable of performing sedentary work, the company had never addressed numerous other letters from Dr. Patel in which he had explicitly opined that Glenn could not withstand the emotional stress of even sedentary work. The company’s own medical expert, who had not examined Glenn personally, had apparently never read those letters. Furthermore, MetLife did not address, or even mention, the ruling by the Social Security Administration that Glenn was completely disabled. Those omissions, according to the court of appeals, demonstrated that MetLife’s decision “was not the product of a principled and deliberative reasoning process.”

[edit] Petition for Certiorari

MetLife’s petition to the Supreme Court presented two arguments for reversal: first, that the Sixth Circuit had wrongly concluded that MetLife’s role as both the administrator and the funder of the Sears benefit plan, “without more,” created a conflict of interest that should be factored into judicial review of an ERISA claim; and second, that the Sixth Circuit had erred in ruling that MetLife’s failure to address the success of Glenn’s SSA disability claim served as evidence that the company’s denial of Glenn’s benefits was an abuse of discretion. Only the first argument will be reviewed by the Supreme Court.

According to the petitioner, the Sixth Circuit’s ruling that MetLife’s dual role necessarily created a problematic conflict of interest was in accord with the law of six other circuits, but conflicted with the rulings of the First and Seventh Circuits. The resolution of that circuit split should be seen as “vital” because ERISA was intended to create a uniform set of standards applicable to benefit plans throughout the country. Multiple circuits have acknowledged the existence of the split, and have also commented on the difficulty of analyzing conflicts of interest under ERISA. Furthermore, the Sixth Circuit’s holding was incorrect because ERISA explicitly authorizes the same entity both to fund and to administer a single plan, and an arrangement authorized by ERISA should not be penalized by the courts.

In her brief in opposition to MetLife’s petition, Glenn attempted to distinguish her own case from the cases identified by MetLife as sources of conflicting authority from other circuits. According to Glenn, the court of appeals’ ruling in her case was not actually in conflict with the holdings of the First, Second, or the Seventh Circuits because MetLife’s dual role as funder and administrator was not the only evidence that the company had a conflict of interest. Specifically, MetLife demonstrated a conflict of interest by procuring legal counsel to facilitate Glenn’s application for SSA benefits, and then later denying that Glenn was disabled—a position inconsistent with the company’s support for Glenn’s SSA claim. This additional evidence of a conflict of interest brought the Sixth Circuit into line with the First, Second, and Seventh Circuits, which have declined to hold that an insurer’s dual role, in and of itself, creates a problematic conflict of interest, but will find a conflict of interest if additional evidence, beyond the dual role, points to possible self-dealing.

Glenn added that, even if the Sixth Circuit erred in finding a conflict of interest, the error was without import. MetLife’s denial of Glenn’s claim would have been overturned even if the conflict of interest had not been weighed by the court of appeals. MetLife’s decision-making process contained so many inexplicable gaps that its rejection of Glenn’s claim ranked as capricious and arbitrary, even without evidence of a conflict of interest.

On April 16, 2007, the Supreme Court invited the Solicitor General to submit a brief expressing the views of the United States. In its brief, the government recommended that the Court grant certiorari to review MetLife’s first Question Presented, and that it specify another: How should an administrator’s conflict of interest factor into a court’s review of a claim denial? Both questions were important, according to the government, because the law of the circuits regarding conflicts of interest under ERISA is confused and inconsistent. The circuits have adopted conflicting positions as to whether a single company’s role as both an administrator and funder of a benefit plan creates a conflict of interest that should be weighed by a court. Those circuits that have ruled that a dual-role company has a conflict of interest that must be considered on judicial review do not agree as to how that conflict of interest should be incorporated into judicial analysis of benefit denials. Several circuits, including the Sixth, review benefit decisions where such a conflict of interest is present under an abuse-of-discretion standard, but maintain that “the particular degree of deference afforded depends on the seriousness of the conflict.” Other circuits have adopted a different approach, shifting the burden of proof to the insurer when a conflict of interest exists, or employing a stricter de novo standard of review. In the government’s view, MetLife provides an opportunity for the Court to address those disagreements among the circuits.

The Court granted certiorari on January 18, 2008, selecting the two Questions Presented endorsed by the government.

[edit] Merits Briefing

Question One

MetLife argues that, by both administering and funding the Sears benefit plan, it “does not act under a conflict of interest that must be considered on judicial review.” In support of that contention, MetLife points to the language of ERISA, 29 U.S.C. § 1108(c)(3), which permits a single entity to serve both as a plan’s administrator and its payer. “It cannot be the case that an arrangement that was expressly contemplated—and authorized—by Congress, without more, changes the standard of review for discretionary benefit determinations.” That assertion, according to MetLife, is further confirmed by principles of trust law, under which a trustee is presumed to have “‘acted in good faith’ despite . . . a potential conflict, unless there is some affirmative evidence to the contrary.”

MetLife’s dual role is, furthermore, consistent with the purposes of ERISA because it leads to more efficient resolution and payment of claims, which may in turn make benefit plans more attractive to employers and so result in the proliferation of such plans. Subjecting companies like MetLife to a more stringent standard of judicial review, on the other hand, might “invite wasteful litigation that can only diminish the assets that are ultimately available to provide and fund benefits.”

Finally, in practical terms, MetLife’s administration of claims is unlikely to be affected by the company’s concurrent obligation to pay benefits, because of “the realities of the insurance business.” MetLife has strong business incentives to serve as a fair administrator; if it fails to do so, it will alienate plan participants and their employers, who will seek out alternative insurers. Additionally, the financial incentive for MetLife to deny claims to avoid having to pay benefits is less than it seems, because MetLife structures its business in anticipation of having to pay benefits, and because claim decisions are made by salaried employees who “do not have direct personal stakes in the outcome of their decisions.”

According to Glenn, MetLife acts under “an obvious conflict of interest.” Every claim that MetLife denies represents payments that MetLife will not have to make. Other dual-role insurers, such as UnumProvident, have in the past adopted a practice of denying potentially meritorious claims for the precise purpose of enhancing corporate profits.

Although ERISA permits dual-role fiduciaries like MetLife, it neither endorses them nor prescribes a particular standard of review for their decisions. The Court in Firestone specifically held that ERISA did not establish standards of review, and it stated that a fiduciary’s conflict of interest “‘must be weighed as a ‘facto[r] in determining whether there is an abuse of discretion.’” Trust law supports the Court’s statement. While a trustee may operate under a conflict of interest with the consent of the settlor, the conflicted trustee’s conduct must bear up under “especially careful scrutiny.” MetLife’s contrary interpretation of trust law is “the legal equivalent of a skid-row shanty.”

One of ERISA’s main goals is to protect plan beneficiaries, a purpose that is served by close scrutiny of dual-role fiduciaries. MetLife’s reassurances about the practical realities of the insurance business ring false. MetLife’s interest in maintaining a good reputation among employers will not deter improper denial of claims because employers cannot “police millions of claim denials.” Furthermore, MetLife operates a high-volume business in which the denial of many small claims translates into potentially massive increases in profits. Finally, MetLife’s employees, while salaried, nevertheless have an interest in the outcome of their claim decisions, because many insurers “give bonuses based on profits or that pressure adjusters to deny claims.”

The Solicitor General’s brief largely dovetails with the respondent’s. It argues that a dual-role entity like MetLife “has a conflict of interest under the plain meaning of that phrase”: when MetLife awards benefits to plan participants, it incurs expenses as a direct result. MetLife does not truly attempt to deny that it operates under a conflict of interest; rather, it claims that the conflict of interest is insignificant for the purposes of judicial review of benefits determinations. In the government’s reading of trust law, that contention is untenable: “Under settled principles of trust law, courts routinely consider a trustee’s conflict of interest in reviewing the propriety of his decisions.” Such close scrutiny of a fiduciary’s conflicts also harmonizes with ERISA’s goals and with the Court’s decisions in cases such as Firestone and Pegram v. Herdrich (2000).

In particular, the government attacks MetLife’s assertion that benefit plans are sufficiently regulated by federal and state agencies, and that increased judicial scrutiny is unwarranted. That assertion is inconsistent with Congress’s decision to include a private right of action in ERISA, and ignores the fact that while the Secretary of Labor may “enforce fiduciary duties,” he is powerless to file claims for improperly denied benefits.

Question Two

MetLife asserts that, if a dual role in and of itself is to be considered evidence of a conflict of interest that must be considered on judicial review, then that conflict should be weighed by the courts as merely one factor among many, and courts should still employ an abuse-of-discretion standard of review. Further, “[i]n the absence of evidence that the claim administrator’s decision was infected by self-dealing, . . . such a conflict should be given only de minimis weight.” Abuse-of-discretion review, according to MetLife, was mandated by the Court in Firestone, and according a conflict of interest only de minimis weight comports with ERISA’s authorization and “endorse[ment]” of dual-role fiduciaries.

Under that standard, says MetLife, the Sixth Circuit’s ruling was erroneous, because it was overly searching, failing to accord MetLife’s decision appropriate deference. No evidence suggested that MetLife engaged in self-dealing, and as a result, its conflict of interest should have carried little weight. In addition, MetLife’s claim denial was supported by evidence, and so “[i]t was therefore well within the bounds of MetLife’s discretion to credit this evidence over Dr. Patel’s conveniently-timed” insistence that Glenn could not endure the psychological stress created by the vast majority of jobs.

Glenn counters that the decisions of dual-role insurers merit “especially careful scrutiny” under the tenets of trust law. While this standard is deferential, it requires courts to re-weigh evidence relied upon by the plan administrator. Furthermore, if courts detect indications that the conflict of interest has actually influenced the administrator’s decision, the level of deference accorded the decision should be decreased based on the strength of the evidence indicating self-dealing. Under this standard, the Sixth Circuit’s ruling should be affirmed, because the court of appeals properly re-weighed the evidence presented to MetLife and found that it did not support the insurer’s decision.

Finally, the government endorses a standard of review similar to, but somewhat less strict than, the one proposed by Glenn: “reasonableness under the totality of the circumstances.” This standard emerges from “settled principles of trust law,”and from the Court’s reasoning in Firestone. In less abstract terms, the government’s standard “simply requires that the court’s review be as searching of the administrator’s decision as the facts and circumstances—including the existence of a conflict of interest—warrant.” Under that standard, the Sixth Circuit’s decision should stand, because the court properly considered MetLife’s conflict of interest as one factor among many in determining whether the denial of Glenn’s claim was reasonable.

[edit] Oral Argument Recap

The justices spent almost the whole of oral argument attempting to understand the practical differences between the (supposedly) varying standards of review proposed by MetLife, Glenn, and the United States. At the start of argument by petitioner’s counsel Amy Posner, the justices clarified terminology, making no secret of the fact that they considered MetLife to be operating under a conflict of interest. (Justice Scalia: “So let’s call that [an insurer with conflicting interests in serving beneficiaries and boosting profits] a conflicted fiduciary, somebody who has two loyalties, whether or not he allows the one loyalty to distort his judgment.”). But determining how an insurer’s conflicted status should factor into a court’s review of claim denials proved far more difficult, and the justices returned to the question again and again.

Posner argued that a structural conflict of interest should not be weighed by a court unless there is some indication that a “slip occur[red],” and the conflict actually affected the claims administration process. But the justices were dissatisfied with her formulation. Chief Justice Roberts asked how exactly the judicial review should work—how does a court consider the conflict of interest as a factor but no more? Given the same set of facts, when an insurer has denied a claim, would the presence or absence of a conflict of interest make the denial reasonable in the first instance but unreasonable in the second? Posner suggested that the plan administrator had discretion to make the decision in either instance. But what does that mean? Justice Scalia pressed. Does the conflict of interest make no difference then? Yes, it does make a difference, Posner conceded, but the conflict “must be a factor that’s weighed with the other factors.”

Justice Ginsburg attempted to clarify the applicable standard by looking at the facts of Glenn’s case as an example. She suggested that MetLife’s denial of benefits to Glenn, coming after its insistence that Glenn seek disability benefits from the Social Security Administration, seemed suspicious. But while she and Posner argued back and forth over whether MetLife’s actions were in fact suspicious, the standard for which Posner was advocating remained vague. Justice Souter waded into the fray with a hypothetical. If a judge is reviewing a denial of benefits and is “on the fence” with regard to whether the denial was reasonable, can the existence of a structural conflict of interest in effect push him off the fence by convincing him to rule against the insurer? Is the conflict a sort of tiebreaker?

Barely giving Posner time to reply with an equivocal answer, Justice Alito jumped in with an alternative standard. He understood MetLife’s argument to be that the conflict should not be weighed at all by the judge absent evidence that the conflict actually affected the decision on the claim. Wasn’t that right? Yes, said Posner. But she then agreed with Souter that the conflict-as-tiebreaker standard he had proposed “could” also be consistent with the Court’s precedent.

Well, who was right? demanded the Chief Justice. Souter or Alito? Which standard? Justice Stevens noted that if Justice Alito were correct, Posner would then face a problem of proof, because it’s not clear how a plaintiff could prove that a conflict of interest had actually affected a benefit denial. Posner acknowledged that “[t]hat is a problem” but proposed no solution.

Counsel for the respondent, E. Joshua Rosenkranz, received many of the same questions as Posner. Rosenkranz characterized the standard advocated by Glenn as “especially careful scrutiny” but ran into the same problems that Posner had when he tried to define it. Chief Justice Roberts tried to pin him down: “[W]hich position do you adopt? . . . [T]he Justice Souter hypothetical or the Justice Alito hypothetical?” Both, said Rosenkranz. His version of “especially careful scrutiny” entails two components: first, searching review of the actions of a structurally conflicted fiduciary, and second, a greater likelihood that a decision at the “outer limits of the zone of reasonableness” will be overruled if made by a conflicted insurer.

His answer did not satisfy the justices. Justice Souter set out three hypotheticals. In each the fiduciary in question was posited to have a structural conflict of interest. In the first case, the fiduciary denies a claim for what are clearly profit-related motives. In the second, the fiduciary’s decision is “within the zone of reasonableness,” but “close to the edge.” In the third, the judge reviewing the fiduciary’s decision is entirely torn as to whether the decision was reasonable; the evidence on each side of the issue is perfectly balanced. How would the standard of review advocated by Glenn factor into each scenario? Rosencranz offered several answers, none of which clearly answered the question, and none of which seemed to resolve the questions in the justices’ minds. And so, when Nicole Saharsky of the Solicitor General’s Office took her turn at the podium to argue in support of Glenn, the justices returned to the same issue.

The Chief Justice began questioning Saharsky almost immediately, expressing concern that the standard of review she was suggesting—reasonableness review “where the conflict of interest is considered as a factor”—did not seem distinct from regular abuse-of-discretion review. Breyer, Scalia, and Ginsburg pressed Sarharsky on the practical applications of the standard she had articulated, but, while making general references to trust law as a guide, she was unable to offer a more precise formulation. Finally Justice Kennedy turned the Court’s attention to the specifics of the case at hand: “Can you tell me what the Sixth Circuit did wrong here?” It used the wrong standard of review, Sarharsky replied, using the terms “arbitrary and capricious” rather than “reasonable,” but the United States otherwise supports the decision of the Sixth Circuit. The appellate court properly applied “greater scrutiny to . . . the claims determination in this case” because of MetLife’s conflict of interest.

Justice Scalia broke in to comment that “greater scrutiny” did not sound like reasonableness review with the conflict of interest added in as an extra factor to consider; it sounded like a stricter standard of review. Justice Souter attempted to clarify the situation by proposing two different models of judicial weighing that would incorporate the conflict of interest as a factor. One would take the conflict into account at the same time that all other evidence about the claims determination was reviewed. The second would require the judge first to evaluate all other evidence, and then to consider the conflict of interest only if the initial evaluation of evidence “results[ed]in something close to equipoise”—again, the conflict-of-interest as tiebreaker. The first scenario is correct, said Saharsky; the conflict should be considered during the initial analysis. With little time remaining in her argument, she added that the problem with the justices’ questions was that the conflict-of-interest factor has no precise mathematical weight; it is just “something that the Court has to take into account.”

In a brief rebuttal, Posner argued that MetLife’s conflict of interest “should have no effect” on the “zone of reasonableness,” thus concluding an argument in which no advocate seemed to satisfy a majority of the Justices with his or her proposed answer to the second Question Presented.

[edit] Opinion Analysis

In an opinion that freely acknowledges its own indeterminacy, the Supreme Court ruled on June 19 that a company which both administers and funds a benefit plan operates under a conflict of interest that must be considered as a factor in a court’s review of claim denials.

The justices, while split over other questions raised by the case, agreed unanimously on the most basic issue: the Sixth Circuit was correct in holding that MetLife, as a plan administrator that both reviews claims and pays out benefits, has conflicting interests. “The employer’s fiduciary interest may counsel in favor of granting a borderline claim while its immediate financial interest counsels to the contrary,” wrote Justice Breyer.

In its decision below, the Sixth Circuit explicitly considered that conflict of interest when reviewing MetLife’s denial of benefits to respondent Glenn, a Sears employee who filed for disability benefits after a heart condition impaired her ability to work. After MetLife rejected Glenn’s claim, asserting that she was still physically capable of performing full-time sedentary work, Glenn brought suit against the insurance company under ERISA, which authorizes federal courts to review the decisions of benefit plan administrators. Glenn lost her case in district court but prevailed before the Sixth Circuit. In concluding that MetLife had abused its discretion in denying Glenn’s claim, the court of appeals relied on what it regarded as several key factors. For example, although Glenn had qualified for permanent Social Security disability benefits, MetLife ignored the findings of the Social Security Administration in deciding to deny her claim. The company also disregarded certain medical reports that supported Glenn’s claim, withheld some of those reports from the expert hired to review Glenn’s medical files, and failed to address evidence that job-related stress of any kind exacerbated Glenn’s illness. These factors, plus the existence of MetLife’s conflict of interest, convinced the Sixth Circuit that the claim denial was unreasonable and should be reversed.

According to the Supreme Court’s majority opinion, written by Justice Breyer and joined by Justices Alito, Ginsburg, Souter, and Stevens, the decision below was correct. The court of appeals properly “weighed” the conflict of interest “as a factor determining whether there [was] an abuse of discretion.” This analysis included an appropriately “deferential standard of review”; the presence of a conflict of interest does not, the majority emphasized, automatically authorize a court to apply heightened scrutiny to a claim denial normally analyzed only for an abuse of discretion. Instead, the conflict simply ranks as “but one factor among many that a reviewing judge must take into account.”

This “one factor among many” formulation does not, as the majority forthrightly admitted, constitute “a detailed set of instructions” to lower courts. But the opinion did give some guidance, indicating that a court reviewing the decisions of a conflicted plan administrator should engage in a two-step process. First, a court must determine the proper weight to assign to the conflict of interest. The conflict might carry little or no weight at all if, for example, the administrator has taken steps to neutralize it by “walling off claims administrators from those interested in firm finances, or imposing management checks that penalize inaccurate decisionmaking irrespective of whom the inaccuracy benefits.” On the other hand, “where circumstances suggest a higher likelihood that” the conflict “affected the benefits decision,” it should be weighted more heavily.

Once the court has decided the relative importance of the administrator’s conflict of interest, it must examine “other factors” associated with the claim denial—such factors as, in Glenn’s case, the administrator’s failure to provide all medical reports to a hired expert, or its unexplained rejection of the findings of the Social Security Administration. If these “other factors,” when viewed deferentially, “are closely balanced,” leaving the court uncertain as to whether the claim denial was reasonable, then the conflict of interest may serve as a tiebreaker. Here the relative importance of the conflict of interest in the particular case becomes relevant: if the conflict seems more important, then the court may more easily determine that the “other factors” characterizing the claim denial point toward an abuse of discretion. If the conflict seems of little or no importance, then the court’s focus should remain mostly on the “other factors” involved in the adminstrator’s decision. In Glenn’s case, for example, the Sixth Circuit gave MetLife’s conflict “weight to some degree,” but “would not have found the conflict alone determinative.” Instead, it was largely those “other factors”—MetLife’s selective emphasis on medical reports that reflected poorly on Glenn’s claim, its inexplicable disagreement with the Social Security Administration—that convinced the court of appeals to overrule the claim denial.

Critics of the Court’s decision will likely object that this process for weighing an administrator’s conflict of interest is amorphous and unpredictable. The Court, doubtless anticipating that charge, asserted that further clarity is neither possible nor desirable: “There are no talismanic words that can avoid the process of judgment. . . . [T]he want of certainty in judicial standards partly reflects the intractability of any formula to furnish definiteness of content for all the impalpable factors involved in judicial review.”

Not all of the justices proved comfortable with this “want of certainty” regarding the manner in which a conflict of interest should be factored into a court’s analysis. Chief Justice Roberts, while concurring in the bulk of the majority opinion and in the judgment, wrote separately to say that he would only give a conflict of interest such as MetLife’s weight if circumstances demonstrated that the conflict had actually influenced the claim denial in question; only then would a court be justified in “heightening the level of scrutiny” applied. According to Roberts, the conflict of interest was irrelevant in MetLife’s case because other factors independent of that conflict demonstrated that the claim denial was unreasonable.

Justice Kennedy wrote an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part. Unlike the Chief Justice, he did not object to either the majority’s reasoning or its framework for weighing conflicts of interest. Instead, he argued that the Court had been too hasty in voting to affirm the Sixth Circuit’s ruling. The Sixth Circuit had not engaged in the process of deciding how much weight to accord MetLife’s conflict of interest. As a result, the case should have been remanded to the court of appeals for further proceedings in light of the Supreme Court’s opinion.

In dissent, Justice Scalia, joined by Justice Thomas, criticized what he called the majority’s “judge-liberating totality of the circumstances test,” and deemed the majority opinion “painfully opaque, despite its promise of elucidation.” He contended that an administrator’s conflict of interest should not be weighed by a court unless the administrator could be shown to have acted from an improper motive. In that circumstance, a court would be free to conclude that the administrator had abused its discretion, and then to review the claim denial de novo. By that standard, the Sixth Circuit should not have considered MetLife’s conflict of interest at all, but should merely have reviewed the decision to deny benefits for reasonableness.

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