Ok, I have a pair class (same one mentioned in earlier thread) that I am inserting into a LinkedHashSet. LHSs cannot have duplicate values and I'm assuming that it ...

It's not terribly clean, but you could use indexOf() and check if it returns -1. Better than breaking out a loop.

If you are fortunate enough to be using JDK 7, the newly available Objects class is the obvious (at least to me) choice for implementing the “common” Java object ...