Insurance Law Commons^™

The Shifting Terrain Of Risk And Uncertainty On The Liability Insurance Field, Tom Baker

All Faculty Scholarship

Recent sociological and historical work suggests that insurance risks often are not reliably calculable, except in hindsight. Insurance is “an uncertain business,” characterized by competition for premiums that pushes insurers into the unknown. This essay takes some preliminary steps that extend this insight into the liability insurance field. The essay first provides a simple quantitative comparison of U.S. property and liability insurance premiums over the last sixty years, setting the stage to make three points: (1) liability insurance premiums have grown at a similar rate as property insurance premiums and GDP over this period, providing yet another piece of evidence …

Under Attack: Terrorism Risk Insurance Regulation, Alexia Brunet Marks

Publications

Scholarly debates over the September 11th attacks focus predominantly on high-profile issues, such as torture, preventive detention, interrogation, privacy, and surveillance. These debates have overshadowed the equally important and far-reaching issue of terrorism risk insurance, which not only involves billions of dollars, but provides powerful incentives to keep us safe. Developing a sound understanding of the market for terrorism risk insurance is essential to guiding the difficult determination of the appropriate balance between private and public responsibility for preventing and (when necessary) compensating for terrorism.

The attacks of September 11th represented one of the costliest insurance events in American history. …