At its annual meeting last May, the American Law Institute (ALI) approved a final draft of the Restatement of the Law of Liability Insurance, ending an eight-year project that began in 2010. The Restatement is a set of standards that inform judges and lawyers on how to handle insurance liability cases.
Kyle Logue, the Douglas A. Kahn Collegiate Professor of Law at Michigan Law, and Professor Tom Baker of the University of Pennsylvania Law School—both insurance law scholars—are the authors of the Restatement and served as associate reporter and reporter, respectively.
“Liability insurance is an especially important type of insurance for individuals and businesses,” Logue says, both because “liability insurance is how they manage the risk of being sued” and because “liability insurance provides a sort of private regulatory system through which other areas of law—including torts and some aspects of securities law—achieve their social functions, whether those functions be deterrence, corrective justice, or compensation.”
According to Logue, the rules set forth in the new Restatement “will help to clarify and give coherence to this important area of law.”
As with all Restatement projects, this Restatement is the product of an elaborate editorial process, Logue says. It included more than 30 drafts over eight years and involved input from a large number of lawyers, judges, and scholars, many of whom are leading experts in insurance law.
