Law Commons^™

Bank Powers To Sell Annuities, Tamar Frankel

Faculty Scholarship

The conflict over turf between the banking industry and the insurance agents has heated up again. In the 1993 case Variable Annuity Life Ins. Co. v. Clarke, ¹ the Fifth Circuit held banks have no power to sell fixed annuities issued by insurance companies in cities with more than 5,000 inhabitants. On June 6, 1994, the Supreme Court granted certiorari to review the decision. ³ Both the Clinton Administration and members of Congress are considering steps toward resolving this issue. Concerned that the flight of high-quality borrowers from the banking system has rendered bank lending increasingly risky, the Comptroller of …

Private Insurance, Social Insurance, And Tort Reform: Toward A New Vision Of Compensation For Illness And Injury, Kenneth S. Abraham, Lance Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

The United States does not have a system for compensating the victims of illness and injury; it has a set of different institutions that provide compensation. We rely on both tort law and giant programs of public and private insurance to compensate the victims of illness and injury. These institutions perform related functions, but the relationships among them are far from coherent. Indeed, the institutions sometimes work at cross-purposes, compensating some victims excessively and others not at all.

The absence of a coherent system of compensation is reflected even in suggested reforms of existing institutions. Proposals to reform tort law …