03/06/2026
Does the Fifth Amendment takings clause bar the government from clawing back pension funds?
In 2014, Congress changed the law governing private funds that manage pensions for employees of multiple companies, allowing them to re-write the contracts that govern those pensions. For 74-year old William King and many other retirees, that meant a reduction in the monthly payments they received from pensions that had been vested for many years. In 2017, King became the lead plaintiff in a class-action suit arguing that by authorizing one private party to take funds from another, congress violated the Fifth Amendment prohibition against taking private property for public use. Lower courts disagreed on whether the “Takings Clause” applies here, and the plaintiffs have asked the US Supreme Court to weigh in.
Last week Kurt Kastorf of Kastorf Law and -Michael dougherty of Dougherty PLLC submitted an amicus brief to SCOTUS on behalf of Samantha J. Prince, a Penn State Dickinson Law professor widely recognized as an expert in retirement plans and employer-sponsored benefit schemes. Kastorf Law’s brief argues that “Accrued retirement benefits … are vested, nonforfeitable contractual rights to those benefits” protected by the Fifth Amendment. In fact, “Vested rights to retirement benefits have a unique status among contract provisions; they represent not just the maturation of a legal milestone, but the point where a worker has fully paid for a benefit through their labor.”
Read more: https://kastorflaw.com/analysis/does-the-takings-clause-apply-to-contractual-rights/
