This Article, awarded the 2011-12 Liberty Mutual Prize by Boston College Law School, identifies four different conceptions of insurance that have operated in the debates about insurance and insurance law in recent decades, analyzes these conceptions, and examines the normative agendas that drive...

This Article examines the ways in which insurance coverage is incomplete, and the reasons why coverage is incomplete. It argues that, because all insurance policies and all insurance coverage is incomplete, the notions of a “gap” in coverage and “incomplete” coverage typically are...

Insurance coverage disputes are mostly about the correct interpretation of an insurance policy provision. But three myths confuse and confound thinking about the interpretation of insurance policies. The first myth is that an unambiguous insurance policy provision -- a provision with a...

The rule that evidence of compliance with or departure from custom is admissible to prove negligence implements the idea that recurring patterns of conduct have a bearing on what constitutes reasonable care. In contrast, evidence of the incidence of practices that are not sufficiently widespread...

Important features of both the incidence and magnitude of tort liability depend heavily, and therefore arbitrarily, on luck. One of a number of examples is the eggshell-plaintiff rule, which imposes liability for all the physical injury a defendant causes, even if the amount of that injury was...

Cyberattacks have the potential to cause simultaneous, very large losses to numerous firms across the globe, thus resulting in a cyber “catastrophe.” Moreover, there are plausible reasons for believing that a future cyberattack could produce world-wide losses that are larger by an order of...

The BP oil spill of 2010 focused considerable attention on the operating conduct of BP, on the potential liability of BP and other entities associated with the Spill, and on the Fund that BP established to provide compensation to victims of the Spill. Much less attention has been paid, however,...

The heart of insurance – what enables insurance to function – is risk aversion. It follows from the fact that potential policyholders are risk averse that sometimes they are also averse to the risk that insurance covering a loss will not be available or will not be reliable. In this Article...