Employee Benefits and Executive Compensation

This novel casebook offers an accessible introduction to modern employee benefits and executive compensation law, with primary emphasis on clarity and comprehensibility in presenting these technically challenging subjects. It is the first casebook to cover both employee benefits and executive compensation, two closely related fields that are frequently simultaneously practiced by American lawyers. The text is organized to permit an intuitively ordered progression through the basic tax and regulatory tenets that underlie both employee benefits and executive compensation law, with pauses to explain fundamental nonlegal concepts often unfamiliar to students -- including present value and actuarial analysis, design principles of retirement and insurance plans, and related economic ideas such as adverse selection and moral hazard. Substantial material is also devoted to the prominent public policy questions that currently surround the provision and regulation of employee retirement and health benefits in the United States, including significant discussion of the health reform legislation of 2010 as well as controversy over levels of executive compensation. The book is suitable for use either for a single overall survey class covering both employee benefits and executive compensation law, or for a class that focuses on either topic separately.