Insurance Law Commons^™

Uncovering Settlements: Problems, Opportunities And Solutions For Settling Liability Cases In Which Insurance Coverage Is In Dispute, Marialuisa Gallozzi, Jodi Mcdougall, James Murray, Catalina Sugayan

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Artificial Intelligence In The Insurance Industry And Bad Faith Risk, Mary E. Borja, Edward J. Currie Jr., Lorelie Masters

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

No abstract provided.

An Ethics Conundrum: What Am I? Coverage Counsel Or Claim Investigator Or Both?, Neil B. Posner

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

No abstract provided.

What Is The Availability Of Insurance Coverage For Claims Of Sexual Misconduct And Abuse?, Paul Walker-Bright, Karen Dixon, Michael Hamilton, Seth Row

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Liability Insurer’S Duty To Defend “Suits”, Douglas R. Richmond

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Tel-Ai-Matic Privacy, Anya E.R. Prince

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

Vehicles collect a staggering amount of data from drivers and passengers for various reasons. Automobiles increasingly include sensors and technology to improve safety and driver convenience. But auto insurers also find this trove of consumer data useful for pricing through telematics. An ever-growing number of data points can be fed into artificial intelligence (AI) systems to identify correlations with driving risk. Yet the data can also reveal sensitive information related to health and protected traits. Lawmakers, regulators, and plaintiffs are increasingly scrutinizing the privacy practices of automakers and data brokers. Growing scrutiny of automakers' practices necessarily draws attention to the …

Governing Algorithmic Insurance: Reconciling The Eu Ai Act With Insurance-Specific Regulation, Pierpaolo Marano, Shu Li

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the insurance industry, driving automation in underwriting, claims handling, and risk assessment. These technological developments offer enhanced efficiency and innovation, but they also raise complex legal questions regarding transparency, fairness, bias, and accountability. Within the European Union, existing regulatory frameworks—chiefly Solvency II and the Insurance Distribution Directive (IDD)—provide prudential and conduct-of-business safeguards but were not designed with algorithmic systems in mind. In response to emerging challenges, the EU adopted the Artificial Intelligence Act in 2024, establishing a horizontal, risk-based legal framework applicable across all sectors, including insurance. This article provides an EU-focused legal analysis of …

Insurability And Liability For Ai-Caused Harms, Mark A. Geistfeld

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

The opacity of AI decision-making has led many tort scholars to conclude that ordinarily it will be infeasible to prove negligence or defect-based forms of products liability for AI-caused harms. According to mainstream tort theory, this evidentiary hurdle justifies strict enterprise liability for commercial AI distributors. Fully internalizing injury costs within these business enterprises adequately incentivizes them to adopt reasonably safe practices while relying on their liability insurance policies to efficiently and fairly compensate accident victims.

Mainstream theory, however, decisively biases the analysis in favor of strict enterprise liability by not accounting for how the expansion of liability would substantially …

Insurance And The Law Of Artificial Intelligence, Kenneth S. Abraham, Catherine M. Sharkey

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

This Essay predicts that concerns about the insurability and insurance of AI liability will prove to be either exaggerated or unwarranted as the future unfolds. AI liability is already covered by a number of existing forms of “silent” liability insurance. We also predict the growth of “affirmative” AI insurance that expressly covers specified AI losses. There are already tiny bits of such insurance. That is how cyber insurance began, and it is now a thriving, $16.6 billion business in the U.S. alone. We believe that affirmative AI insurance will develop in a similar fashion, and that courts should anticipate such …

Insurance Era: Risk, Governance, And The Privatization Of Security In Postwar America: An Essay Review, Katherine Hempstead

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

No abstract provided.

E/Insuring The Ai Age: Empirical Insights Into Artificial Intelligence Liability Policies, Anat Lior

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

Insurance represents an important but underappreciated part of our lives. Both individuals and corporations gain from purchasing coverage from insurers to manage and hedge their risks. It is a necessary mechanism in modern society to support innovation while ensuring that its unavoidable victims will be compensated. The innovation of emerging technologies alters the existing risk landscape, challenging insurance companies, innovators, and individuals' ability to manage their risks. The current emerging technology of Artificial Intelligence (Al) significantly emphasizes this trend. Insurance companies are grappling with the notion of Al. They are exploring different traditional and novel insurance products that they can …

Like A Good Neighbor, State Courts Are There: The Case For Remanding Covid-19 Business Interruption Actions To State Court, Gabriel L. Johnson

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

Following the emergence of COVID-19 and resulting civil orders seeking to stop its spread, many businesses filed claims with their insurance providers for “business interruption” coverage, a type of insurance intended to compensate businesses for income lost during a temporary forced closure. When insurance companies roundly denied these claims, many small-business owners filed lawsuits in state courts. Insurance company defendants largely removed these cases to federal courts, and business owner plaintiffs filed to remand back to state court. In one consolidated appeal heard by the Third Circuit, DiAnoia’s Eatery, LLC v. Motorist Mutual Insurance Co., businessowner plaintiffs seeking remand to …

Florida's Homeowners Insurance Problems, Peter Molk

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

Floridians have seen dramatically rising homeowners insurance premium increases over the past several years, with year-over-year increases of forty percent or more over multiple years. The problem grew so severe that the State legislature convened a special session in 2022 to address the problem, ultimately passing several efforts designed to moderate rates. This Article reviews the evidence of Florida's experience to interrogate why the State has suffered disparately high homeowners insurance premium increases. In light of this interrogation, I critically assess the prospects for the recent legislative efforts and other suggestions to address the underlying problems. Reform efforts predominantly address …

Rethinking Prop 103'S Approach To Insurance Regulation, Lars Powell, R. J Lehmann, Ian Adams

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Practiced Peril: The Flawed Role Of Experience In Accidental Death Determinations, Casey M. Corvino

Connecticut Law Review

Words often carry an intuitive meaning that defies explicit definition. While this vagueness typically poses no issue in our daily lives, it presents distinct challenges within the legal realm where words and their definitions wield the power to influence the course of justice. One abstract concept is notoriously elusive: what is an accident? Despite the apparent simplicity of identifying what is commonly understood implicitly, there are inherent challenges in “giving substance to a concept which is largely intuitive.”

The Wickman framework was crafted to navigate these challenges, recognizing that an insured’s background, experience, and skill in a particular activity may …

Risky Business: A Review Essay On The Law & Economics Of Selection In Insurance Markets, Peter Siegelman

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Improving The Market For Homeowners Insurance, Jay M. Feinman

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

Markets need information, and better information produces better markets. Consumers need information about products’ features, price, and quality to shop effectively. When they have that information, their buying choices spur competition that produces better products with desirable features at lower prices. The market for homeowners insurance provides reasonable information on price but lacks basic information about the features of policies and company quality. Consumers have little access to information about the coverage terms of policies being offered or the quality of companies that are offering them, so they often make poor choices in purchasing homeowners insurance. The results can be …

Automobile Insurance Premium Price Discrimination: Sex/Gender, Margaret Murolo

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

No abstract provided.

A Primer On The Economics Of Conflicts Of Interest, Peter Siegelman

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

There is a well-known conflict of interest between liability insurers and policyholders with respect to the decision to settle or litigate a claim. This short note provides a simple graphical explanation for the problem and grounds it in the way the structure of the parties' payouts drives their attitudes towards risk. An optional appendix links the insights to the elementary mechanics of financial options.

The Unnatural Disaster Of Insurance, Underinsurance, And Natural Disasters, Kenneth S. Klein

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

This article presents a novel data set describing the frequency of materially inadequate homeowner insurance in the event of a total loss. For decades, after a natural disaster, large percentages of homeowners who have lost their homes report suffering a second devastating loss- that, entirely to their surprise, they are vastly underinsured. These reports provocatively suggest that a large majority of all insured homes in the United States-not just homes destroyed by a natural disaster-might be profoundly, unknowingly, and unintentionally underinsured. Insurance companies reject this possibility. Insurers posit that underinsurance is rare, that other than after natural disasters it may …

Policy Strategies To Improve Cybersecurity, Vincent Yesue

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

No abstract provided.

A Legal Framework For Net Zero Aligned Insurance Products, Franziska Arnold-Dwyer

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

This paper examines how the contractual framework of existing insurance products for consumers and small businesses can be adjusted to help them reduce their net GHG emissions, and thereby facilitate the transition to a sustainable net-zero economy (= Net-Zero Aligned Insurance Products; "NZAIPs"). NZAIPs could give rise to legal and regulatory issues, and this paper considers how these issues could be addressed to create a legal environment that provides safe and fair market conditions for NZAIPs.

What Can't Be Insured: The Policyholder's Own Bad Acts, Travis Luis Pantin

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

From its early eighteenth-century beginnings, modern insurance law has been governed by what can be described as a "non-responsibility" requirement: the insured cannot recover for losses that it caused through its own misbehavior. Although this principle might seem intuitive-you should not be able intentionally to burn down your own home and then get paid for it-scholars continue to debate both the range of the principle's application and its underlying rationale. Current theories of the requirement tend to argue that instrumental goals, such as the minimization of moral hazard or the maximization of victim compensation, ought to determine whether an insured …

Third-Party Moral Hazard And The Problem Of Insurance Externalities, Peter Siegelman, Gideon Parchomovsky

Faculty Articles and Papers

Insurance can lead to loss or claim creation not only by insureds but also by uninsured third parties. These externalities-which we call third-party moral hazard-arise because insurance creates opportunities both to extract rents and to recover otherwise unrecoverable losses. Using examples from health, automobile, kidnap, and liability insurance, we demonstrate that the phenomenon is widespread and important and that the downsides of insurance are greater than previously believed. We explain the economic, social, and psychological reasons for this phenomenon and propose policy responses. Contract-based methods that are traditionally used to control first-party moral hazard can be welfare reducing in the …

"Commonly Accepted Notions Of Insurance" For Captives In Tax Cases Are Not Common Notions Of Insurance In The Insurance Industry, Harold Weston

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Insuring Evolving Technology, Asaf Lubin

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

The study of the interaction between law and technology is more critical today than ever before. Advancements in artificial intelligence, information communications, biological and chemical engineering, and space-faring technologies, to name but a few examples, are forcing us to reexamine our traditional understanding of basic concepts in torts and insurance law. Yet, few insurance professionals and scholars will identify themselves as working in the field of "law-and-technology." For many of them, technology is "just a fact about the world like any other," as Ryan Calo once put it, not one that always merits "special care."' This short paper is an …

Ransomware: A Darwinian Opportunity For Cyber Insurance, Erin Kenneally

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Uncle Sam Re: Improving Cyber Hygiene And Increasing Confidence In The Cyber Insurance Ecosystem Via Government Backstopping, Bryan H. Cunningham, Shauhin A. Talesh

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

The year 2020 was a wake-up call, for the world and specifically for the cyber insurance ecosystem. The COVID-19 global pandemic reminded insurers, observers, and policymakers that actual or newly plausible attacks-including catastrophic cyberattacks-could pose existential threats to the cyber insurance ecosystem. This article examines this risk through a hypothetical catastrophic cyberattack, interviews with sixty participants across the cyber insurance ecosystem, and recent scholarly work. We find that the risk of a catastrophic cyberattack to the solvency of the global insurance ecosystem is real and that cyber insurers have not, as yet, fulfilled their promise to meaningfully improve our collective …

"Cyberwar By Almost Any Definition": Notpetya, The Evolution Of Insurance War Exclusions, And Their Application To Cyberattacks, Josephine Wolff

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Case For Banning (And Mandating) Ransomware Insurance, Kyle D. Logue, Adam B. Shniderman

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

Ransomware attacks are becoming increasingly pervasive and disruptive, resulting in ransom demands becoming more exorbitant. Payments for ransom costs are increasingly being covered by insurance, which may offer coverage for a variety of cyber-related losses. Some commentators have expressed concern over this market phenomenon. Specifically, the concern is that the presence of insurance is making the ransomware problem worse based on the following theory: because there is ransomware insurance that covers ransom payments, and because paying the ransom is often far cheaper than paying the restoration and business interruption costs covered under the policy, there is an increased tendency to …