The Insurability of New Liability Risks

My job is to contribute briefly to the considerations surrounding the insurability of new liability risks. I propose to divide the topic into two questions, namely, "What are new liability risks?" and "What can we say about their insurability?" As far as the first question is concerned, I am not going to speculate about the effects of future technologies. To avoid the dubious concept of "unpredictability", "new liability risks" means for me the totality of the dynamic aspects of liability risks. In this respect, I shall be referring to the observation pattern and the terminology for risks of liability developments that Tom Baker (2004) recently developed in The Geneva Papers. For the second question too, my starting point is another article in The Geneva Papers, the observation by Walter Karten (1997) that "insurability knows no basic formula". I shall therefore be concentrating on a few practical rather than dogmatic aspects. Copyright 2004 The International Association for the Study of Insurance Economics.