Cite as: 508 U. S. 581 (1993)
Opinion of the Court
upon the federal courts authority to govern and enforce the trusts, and there is no more reason to reach such a conclusion here.
Respondents point to our statement in Arroyo v. United States, 359 U. S., at 426-427, that "[c]ontinuing compliance with [the standards of § 302(c)(5)] in the administration of welfare funds was made explicitly enforceable in federal district courts by civil proceedings under § 302(e)." See also Robinson, 455 U. S., at 573, n. 12 (referring to this passage). The statement is perhaps susceptible of the reading that "compliance" was "made . . . enforceable" by authorizing district courts to prohibit further payments to an entity that was not established, or does not hold its funds in trust, for the requisite purposes. But in any case, Arroyo was a criminal prosecution brought under § 302(d), and the statement was therefore pure dictum.4 Also dictum was our statement in NLRB v. Amax Coal Co., 453 U. S. 322, 331 (1981), later quoted in Robinson, supra, at 570, that "the 'sole purpose' of § 302(c)(5) is to ensure that employee benefit trust funds 'are legitimate trust funds, used actually for the specified benefits to the employees of the employers who contribute to them . . . .' " (Emphasis added.) This obiter quotation of a line from the floor debate on the LMRA cannot convert (1) a
4 While Justice Stevens does not dispute that this statement was dictum, he argues that "the reasoning that led us to [that] conclusion . . . is not so easily dismissed." Post, at 596 (emphasis added). We disagree. As one will see by reading the relevant passage from Arroyo (set forth in the concurrence, post, at 596-597), the "reasoning" consisted of leaping from the correct premise, that Congress limited the purposes for which exempt trust funds could be used, to the entirely unsupported conclusion, that § 302(e) rather than state trust law was to be the means by which that limitation was enforced. It is an ipse dixit, rather than a reasoned conclusion—and, to boot, an ipse dixit contradicted by the very holding of the case in which it was pronounced. Arroyo held that malfeasance in the administration of trust funds did not create federal criminal liability under § 302, and there is no basis in either text or reason why it should nonetheless create federal civil liability.
591
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