Module description
Insurance law is a dynamic and exciting aspect of commercial law that all young aspiring law practitioners would benefit from developing an understanding of to underpin their wider legal studies. London traditionally is the most important insurance market that developed insurance practice and law. Today Lloyd’s of London and the London Company Market insure risks placed all over the World. This course offers an excellent introduction whether you wish to specialise in insurance law or merely to widen your understanding of a key component of commercial law. It would be very suitable for students wishing to go on to focus on any areas of law but especially commercial law.
Insurance Law is deeply ingrained in our modern society. Individuals and businesses take a number of risks every day. Travelling from one place to another, driving, working as a professional eg as a solicitor or barrister or medical doctor or a plumber, in a bigger scale operating financial institutions, importing – exporting goods all involve risks. Individuals and businesses take into account the risks involved and take out insurance against such risks. When we go on a holiday we take out travel insurance, if we take out a mortgage the bank requires us to take out a life insurance policy, when you purchase a coffee from a chain coffee shop you must know that inevitably they are insured against their liabilities eg for accidentally spilling the coffee and injuring their customers, importers of goods insure their cargoes carried from overseas countries, airline, trainline, and bus companies purchase insurance insuring their liability to passengers, shipowners purchase hull insurance against loss of or damage to their expensive ships and insurance against their liabilities to their employees as well as the companies that they trade with. Businesses may insure against their loss of profit (business interruption) as a pure economic loss. Whether you do public or private law you must know that there is insurance behind several risks that one may encounter in a day. The English courts today discuss insurance matters every second week if not weekly. One of the issues disputed before the UK Supreme Court in 2020 was the business interruption claims made by small businesses and enterprises against their business interruption insurers after the coronavirus outbreak. We cannot know how many major insurance or reinsurance matters are also arbitrated every day not only in London but also in all other major commercial centres. Hence, studying insurance law will not only broaden your aspect as a lawyer and as an individual but also will be very useful in your career irrespective of your profession. You will have a better understanding of how we all do risk assessments every day. Having learnt the logic and structure in the operation of the insurance contracts, you can protect your interests not only at the contract making stage at the outset, but also later at the dispute stage, if needed.
This course is offered in Semester 1 and aims at introducing the general principles of insurance law. It is fundamental for an insurance lawyer to understand the general principles before moving to the specialised types of contract such as property insurance, liability insurance or marine hull and cargo insurance. This course will start with the special procedure that the London insurance market follows in formation of insurance contracts. It will then move to the duty of fair presentation of the risk (previously duty of good faith) that regulates the assured’s pre-contractual information duty. One of the ways for the insurer to manage the insured risk is to impose obligations on the assured in relation to the risks involved in the insurance contract. Such contractual obligations may be classified as either warranties or conditions. It is fundamentally important for an insurance lawyer to understand the concept of insurance contract terms and how to evaluate them in the light of the common law rules and the Insurance Act 2015. After spending two weeks on the terms of insurance contracts, we will move to analyse the principle of ‘causation’. Covid-19 related insurance claims led to some novel analyses of the principles of causation by the UK Supreme Court. The course then will move on to studying the insurance brokers’ duties which, again, have been heavily disputed before the courts in recent years. Insurance brokers play crucial role in the insurance market and they provide a wide range of employment opportunities all over the world and especially in commercial cities. Towards the end of the semester the course will then explore the principles of subrogation and aggregation clauses. Many cases are in fact disputes between two insurers, but we do not realise this at first sight because when insurers subrogate into the assured’s right of action towards another the insurers must use the assured’s name in the legal action. Finally, whether or not the assured is entitled for a recovery under the insurance contract is a separate matter to the actual amount that the assured is entitled to claim from the insurer under the contract. The quantum of insurance indemnity that the insurer will pay to the assured is assessed by the aggregation clauses.
After studying all of the subjects above, you will have a solid understanding of how insurance contracts operate and how they interact with other types of contract. By the end of the course you will have learnt how to read and interpret an insurance contract from a lawyer point of view, and either as an insurer or as an assured, you will envisage what are the issues that require your attention to assess contractual rights.
Assessment details
Examination (100 %)
Learning outcomes
Learning outcomes:
By the end of the course, students should:
- Have a systematic understanding of the knowledge base and its inter-relationship with other fields of study and will demonstrate current understanding of some specialist areas in depth.
- Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of a wide range of legal concepts, values, principles and rules of English law and able to explain the relationships between them in a number of particular areas
- Demonstrate a sound and generally accurate knowledge and understanding of the law and its context in relation to most areas of law which have been studied.
- Be able to apply knowledge to complex situations, recognise potential alternative conclusions for particular situations and provide supporting reasons for them.
- Learn to address these questions by synthesising materials from different academic disciplines and then applying their analysis to ongoing policy debates.
- Work with ideas at a level of abstraction, arguing from competing perspectives and identify the possibility of new concepts within existing knowledge frameworks and approaches.
- In areas of law which they have not previously studied, be able to use a full range of legal sources to identify the principal controversial issues in a topic.
Teaching pattern
Semester 1
2 hour weekly lectures and, depending on the student numbers, fortnightly tutorials (44 hours)
Self guided learning: 25 hours