Insurance Law Commons^™

Rejecting Word Worship: An Integrative Approach To Judicial Construction Of Insurance Policies, Jeffrey W. Stempel, Erik S. Knutsen

University of Cincinnati Law Review

Insurance coverage litigation is a quest for discerning meaning: Does the insurance policy cover the loss at issue? Construing the insurance policy, courts attempt to give legal effect to what the document purports to command. But what were the intentions and expectations of insurer and insured? Do those intentions even matter? Or is only the written text of the policy relevant to the coverage result? Courts addressing these questions typically frame the interpretative choice as one of strict textualism versus contextual functionalism.

In many, perhaps even most situations, text and context align to create an “easy” case. If a factory …

Public Policy And The Insurability Of Cyber Risk, Asaf Lubin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In June 2017, the food and beverage conglomerate Mondelez International became a victim of the NotPetya ransomware attack. Around 1,700 of its servers and 24,000 of the company’s laptops were suddenly and permanently unusable. Commercial supply and distribution disruptions, theft of credentials from many users, and unfulfilled customer orders soon followed, leading to losses that totaled more than $100 million. Unfortunately, Zurich, which had sold the company a property insurance policy that included a variety of coverages, informed Mondelez in 2018 that cyber coverage would be denied under the policy based on the “war exclusion clause.” This case, now pending, …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Adding Context And Constraint To Corpus Linguistics, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

In Part I, I discuss the reasons why corpus linguistics should not be considered in isolation from contextual factors, as the latter often illuminate meanings that cannot be found from simply chronicling the usage of a given word. In Part II, I demonstrate, through the lens of three Supreme Court cases, that corpus linguistics does not aid interpretation when the words of a statute or document are clear, but their application to the facts at hand is not. My critique of corpus linguistics mirrors the larger, long-running, and ongoing debate of the merits of a more textual approach to interpretation …