[1] Robert Darden sold Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company policies from 1962 to 1980 in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

At trial, the federal district Court held Darden was an independent contractor, not an employee, under common law agency principles.

The Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit found Darden was an employee, and that ERISA’s policy had gone beyond common law agency principles.

In an opinion for the majority of the Court, Justice Souter stated We have often been asked to construe the meaning of "employee" where the statute containing the term does not helpfully define it.

490 U.S., at 739-740, 109 S.Ct., at 2172 (internal quotations omitted).While we supported this reading of the Copyright Act with other observations, the general rule stood as independent authority for the decision.

As for the rest of the Act, Darden does not cite, and we do not find, any provision either giving specific guidance on the term's meaning or suggesting that construing it to incorporate traditional agency law principles would thwart the congressional design or lead to absurd results.

Thus, we adopt a common-law test for determining who qualifies as an "employee" under ERISA,3 a test we most recently summarized in Reid: "In determining whether a hired party is an employee under the general common law of agency, we consider the hiring party's right to control the manner and means by which the product is accomplished.

any individual who, under the usual common-law rules applicable in determining the employer-employee relationship, has the status of an independent contractor") (emphasis added); see also United States v. W.M.

To be sure, Congress did not, strictly speaking, "overrule" our interpretation of those statutes, since the Constitution invests the Judiciary, not the Legislature, with the final power to construe the law.

But a principle of statutory construction can endure just so many legislative revisitations, and Reid's presumption that Congress means an agency law definition for "employee" unless it clearly indicates otherwise signaled our abandonment of Silk's emphasis on construing that term " 'in the light of the mischief to be corrected and the end to be attained.'

And amicus United States, while rejecting Darden's position, also relied on Rutherford Food for the proposition that, when enacting ERISA, Congress must have intended a modified common-law definition of "employee" that would advance, in a way not defined, the Act's "remedial purposes."

The definition of "employee" in the FLSA evidently derives from the child labor statutes, see Rutherford Food, supra, at 728, 67 S.Ct., at 1475, and, on its face, goes beyond its ERISA counterpart.

This latter definition, whose striking breadth we have previously noted, Rutherford Food, supra, at 728, 67 S.Ct., at 1475, stretches the meaning of "employee" to cover some parties who might not qualify as such under a strict application of traditional agency law principles.

Quite apart from its inconsistency with our precedents, the Fourth Circuit's analysis reveals an approach infected with circularity and unable to furnish predictable results.

The court thought it was simply irrelevant that the forfeiture clause in Darden's contract "limited" his expectation of receiving pension benefits, since "it is precisely that sort of employer-imposed condition on the employee's anticipations that Congress intended to outlaw with the enactment of ERISA."

Thus, the Fourth Circuit's test would turn not on a claimant's actual "expectations," which the court effectively deemed inconsequential, ibid., but on his statutory entitlement to relief, which itself depends on his very status as an "employee."

This circularity infects the test's second prong as well, which considers the extent to which a claimant has relied on his "expectation" of benefits by "remaining for 'long years,' or a substantial period of time, in the 'employer's' service, and by foregoing other significant means of providing for [his] retirement."

While this enquiry is ostensibly factual, we have seen already that one of its objects may not be: to the extent that actual "expectations" are (as in Darden's case) unnecessary to relief, the nature of a claimant's required "reliance" is left unclear.

But their application generally turns on factual variables within an employer's knowledge, thus permitting categorical judgments about the "employee" status of claimants with similar job descriptions.

The result of the case was to affirm that principles of agency, alongside "economic reality" or remedying inequality of bargaining according to the purpose of a statute, must be taken into account when determining who is an employee.