Insurance Law Commons^™

Advancing The Aquaculture Industry Through The Federal Crop Insurance Program, Matthew H. Bowen

Ocean and Coastal Law Journal

In recent times, the aquaculture industry has experienced dramatic growth. The growth of the industry is a direct result of an increase in demand for seafood, and a decrease in supply from wild fisheries. The industry, however, is also experiencing growing pains. Aquaculture species, compared to their wild counterparts, are at a higher risk of catastrophic loss from a variety of different perils. These perils make investment in the aquaculture industry significantly risky. The federal crop insurance program could be a tool that mitigates these risks, but the program was designed around terrestrial agriculture, and while aquaculture may be covered …

Seeking Insurance Parity During The Opioid Crisis, Valarie K. Blake

Scholarly Works

Too many privately insured face substantial barriers and delays to getting timely and affordable substance use disorder (SUD) care when they need it, sometimes with terrible and irreversible consequences. Historically, private insurers have been reluctant to cover such services and have been glad to leave this responsibility to public systems like Medicaid. Laws like the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008 (MHPAEA) and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) were meant to make private insurance more generous, but these laws are underenforced and too weak to fully address the challenges of the opioid epidemic. When patients and the …

Terrorism Risk Insurance Act: Time To Renew . . . Or Rethink?, Jeffrey E. Thomas

Faculty Works

This paper summarizes the U.S. program for terrorism insurance, outlines its advantages and disadvantages, and describes the current proposals for extension of the program. The program, generally referred to as a “Federal Backstop,” functions in some ways that are similar to reinsurance, but it does not require participants to pay premiums ex ante. Instead uses an ex post recoupment mechanism to recover some or all of the Federal payments made under the program. This approach has the advantage of reducing the cost and increasing the availability of terrorism insurance. Some have criticized the program for its interference in market mechanisms, …

Substance Use Disorder Insurance Benefits: A Survey Of State Benchmark Plans, Stacey A. Tovino

Faculty Articles

Professor Tovino presents the results of a survey of state benchmark health plan coverage of substance use disorder treatments and services, including treatments and services for opioid use disorder.

"Undue Hardship" And Uninsured Americans: How Access To Healthcare Should Impact Student-Loan Discharge In Bankruptcy, Alexander Gouzoules

Faculty Publications

Student-loan debt has grown to unprecedented heights. Contributing to the severe burden imposed by these debts is the Bankruptcy Code’s unique presumption that they are not dischargeable. To overcome that presumption, a debtor must establish that repayment of her loans would constitute an “undue hardship.” This essay examines the disagreement among bankruptcy courts that have interpreted the “undue hardship” standard in situations where a debtor is unable to afford health insurance—a common occurrence among the economically disadvantaged. After examining recent healthcare reforms, I argue that Congress has expressed a judgment that all Americans should obtain minimum essential healthcare. Though this …

Why Police Should Protect Complainant Autonomy, Randall K. Johnson

Faculty Works

This Essay does its work in, at least, three ways. First, it encourages better use of scarce public sector resources by calling for reform of the police complaint intake process. Next, this Essay identifies the causes of police complaint inefficiencies by critically-assessing how intake is done by the Chicago Police Department (CPD). Lastly, it provides guidance about how to achieve CPD intake reform by better protecting complainant autonomy. Complainant autonomy, at least in this Essay, is defined as a real party in interest’s (i.e. an injured citizen’s) right to control how its allegations are framed by a nominal plaintiff (i.e. …

Insurance Law, J. Price Collins, Blake H. Crawford, Conor J. Mccall

SMU Annual Texas Survey

No abstract provided.

The Deterrence Case For Comprehensive Automaker Enterprise Liability, Kyle D. Logue

Journal of Law and Mobility

This Article lays out the potential (at this point purely theoretical) deterrence benefits of replacing our current auto tort regime (including auto products liability law, driver-based negligence claims, and auto no-fault regimes) with a single, comprehensive automaker enterprise liability system. This new regime would apply not only to Level 5 vehicles, but to all automobiles made and sold to be driven on public roads. Because such a system would make automakers unconditionally responsible for the economic losses resulting from any crashes of their vehicles, it would in effect make automakers into auto insurers as well, although such a change will …

Dual Regulation Of Insurance, Christopher French

Faculty Scholarship

Since this country was created, the insurance industry has been principally regulated by the states with infrequent Congressional interventions. As the insurance industry has evolved in recent decades, however, individual states have become unable to adequately regulate some insurers, such as multinational insurers and foreign insurers, because they lack jurisdiction over such entities. Simply having the federal government assume responsibility for regulating insurers will not solve the current regulatory problems, however, because Congress’ past forays into regulating certain areas of insurance generally have yielded poor results. Consequently, this Article makes the novel proposal and argument that, with the creation of …

Purchasing Health? The Promise And Limits Of Public Health Insurance, Kristen Underhill

Faculty Scholarship

The 2010s have been a momentous decade for Medicaid. With enrollment of over seventy-two million people (19% of the country’s population), Medicaid is the nation’s largest public health insurance program, and it is the primary or sole source of health insurance for vulnerable groups such as low-income children and pregnant women, adults with disabilities, and people in need of long-term care. Since 2014, the pendulum of Medicaid policy has swung from an unprecedented expansion of coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), toward more recent federal regulations and state policy innovations that are instead predicted to limit uptake of benefits. …

Cannabis And Insurance, Francis J. Mootz Iii, Jason Horst

Lewis & Clark Law Review

Although many states have decriminalized or legalized cannabis, it remains a Schedule 1 drug under the federal Controlled Substances Act. The conflict between federal and state law presents many complicated issues, including problems relating to insurance coverage. Insurance law seeks to balance competing policy interests. On one hand, public policy supports reading insurance policies broadly to indemnify policyholders for their losses. On the other hand, public policy counsels against permitting insurance to indemnify (federally) illegal activity. In this Article, we explore some pressing issues arising from the conflict between these policy considerations and offer some analysis of the conflict in …

State Benchmark Plan Coverage Of Opioid Use Disorder Treatments And Services: Trends And Limitations, Stacey A. Tovino

Faculty Articles

Professor Tovino offers a survey of state benchmark plan coverage of opioid use disorder treatments and services, and identifies trends and limitations relevant thereto. Part II of the article provides background information regarding opioid use disorder and the treatments and services available for individuals with this disorder. Part III reviews federal mental health parity law and federal mandatory mental health and substance use disorder law as applied to insurance coverage of treatments and services for opioid use disorder, with a focus on the Affordable Care Act's (ACA's) state benchmark health plan selection requirement and the effect on that requirement of …

The Insurance Data Security Model Law: Strengthening Cybersecurity Insurer-Policyholder Relationships And Protecting Consumers, Koyejo-Isaac Idowu

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Policing Corporate Conduct Toward Minority Communities: An Insurance Law Perspective On The Use Of Race In Calculating Tort Damages, Dhruti J. Patel

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Courts commonly use U.S. Department of Labor actuarial tables, which explicitly take into account the race of the tort victim, to determine average national wage, work-life expectancy, and life expectancy. This practice has led to wide discrepancies between average damage awards for minority plaintiffs compared to white plaintiffs even if both plaintiffs are similarly situated. While recent legal scholarship criticizes the use of race-based tables and addresses the Equal Protection and incentive concerns such tables present, few courts have deviated from the explicit use of race in determining tort damages.

Though the use of demographic features, such as race, to …

The Decline Of Revocation By Physical Act, Barry Cushman

Journal Articles

The power to revoke one’s will by physical act was enshrined in Anglo-American law in 1677 by the Statute of Frauds. It remains the law in Great Britain, in such developed Commonwealth countries as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and in each of the United States of America. Yet the revocation of wills by physical act has become badly out of phase with the law governing nonprobate transfers, which as a general matter requires that an instrument of transfer be revoked only by a writing signed by the transferor. This article surveys the place of revocation by physical act in …

The Core Corporate Governance Puzzle: Contextualizing The Link To Performance, Merritt B. Fox, Ronald J. Gilson, Darius Palia

Faculty Scholarship

There is a puzzle at the core of corporate governance theory. Prior scholarship reports a strong relationship between firms best at creating shareholder value and those rated highly by the established corporate governance indices. Little work explores why, however. We hypothesize that the link between governance and performance depends centrally on context. We illustrate the importance of context by exploring circumstances when a firm's governance structure can operate as a signal of the quality of its management. The idea is that better managers are on average more likely to choose a highly rated governance structure than are bad managers because …

How Far Does The Rabbit Hole Go: The Interaction Between Set-Off Rights And The Voidable Preference Hypothetical In Chapter 7 Liquidation, Josh Rutstein

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

This Note highlights the tension between Section 547 and Section 553 of the Bankruptcy Code, with specific attention paid to the interaction between set-off rights and the hypothetical liquidation invoked by a court in a voidable preference action, and proposes adopting the Ninth Circuit’s reasoning as a bankruptcy court standard when confronted with a similar conflict between the formalized tests in Sections 547 and 553, in an attempt to achieve a more equitable outcome.

Sharing The Costs Of Artificial Intelligence: Universal No-Fault Social Insurance For Personal Injuries, Jin Yoshikawa

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

The twenty-first century is the artificial intelligence (AI) century. In the past few years, AI has become a familiar fixture of everyday life thanks to services like YouTube, Spotify, Netflix, and Alexa. Stocktraders, doctors, insurance brokers, real estate agents, recruiters, artists,and even lawyers now rely on predictive tools powered by AI to perform their highly skilled--even creative--tasks. In the following decades, AI will continue to transform more fields and deliver astonishing advancements in convenience, comfort, safety, and security. At the same time, however, AI will bring about new challenges. AI will offend, disrupt, crash, breach, incite, injure, and even kill …

Battle Of The Sexes: Title Vii’S Failure To Protect Women From Discrimination Against Sex-Linked Conditions, Brooks Land

Georgia Law Review

No abstract provided.

State Benchmark Plan Coverage Of Opioid Use Disorder Treatments And Services: Trends And Limitations, Stacey A. Tovino

Scholarly Works

Professor Tovino offers a survey of state benchmark plan coverage of opioid use disorder treatments and services, and identifies trends and limitations relevant thereto. Part II of the article provides background information regarding opioid use disorder and the treatments and services available for individuals with this disorder. Part III reviews federal mental health parity law and federal mandatory mental health and substance use disorder law as applied to insurance coverage of treatments and services for opioid use disorder, with a focus on the Affordable Care Act's (ACA's) state benchmark health plan selection requirement and the effect on that requirement of …

Substance Use Disorder Insurance Benefits: A Survey Of State Benchmark Plans, Stacey A. Tovino

Scholarly Works

Professor Tovino presents the results of a survey of state benchmark health plan coverage of substance use disorder treatments and services, including treatments and services for opioid use disorder.

Protecting Auto Accident Victims From The Um/Uim Insurer Identity Crisis, Jeffrey W. Stempel, Erik S. Knutsen

Scholarly Works

Automobile liability insurance is mandatory for drivers in all states, so as to provide for an available source of compensation for auto accident victims. Yet more than 20% of drivers in some states drive without valid, collectible automobile liability insurance. Another vast proportion of drivers have woefully inadequate financial limits of liability insurance that could not pay for even a modest percentage of a typical accident victim's compensatory needs. An auto accident victim cannot choose which tortfeasor driver injures her in a collision. Without the at-fault tortfeasor driver's liability insurance to act as a source of full compensation for her …

Detecting And Preventing Insurance Fraud: State Of The Nation In Review, Johnny C. Parker

Articles, Chapters in Books and Other Contributions to Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.