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Themes in insurance law

1. There are two major pieces of work (the Code Review and Sutton) and a number of themes that are the subject matter for this submission. The Insurance Council of Australia appointed me as the Independent Reviewer of the General Insurance Code of Practice, under the Code and the Terms of Reference, on 3 May 2012. 2. The Code Review work took about two years and involved the Code Issues Paper in October 2012 of 111 pages and the Code Review Report in May 2013 of 205 pages. The majority of my recommendations were accepted and the report has made a contribution to the rethinking of self-regulation and the place of voluntary codes in financial services. By then I was writing, with Professor Robert Merkin QC Sutton on Insurance Law for its 4th Edition. It is two volumes, 24 chapters and about 2100 pages excluding tables and index; my contribution was 12 chapters totalling about 960 pages. 3. The Code Review work, particularly on government agency regulation and self-regulation, influenced the pervasive material in Sutton on regulation. It was the subject of the AIDA Rome paper in 2014 on Principles for Self-Regulation; the paper was published by AIDA. 4. Sutton was published in 2015. Its themes are set out below. Those themes are in turn influences in the other work for this submission. There are seven main themes in the publications which I present in this submission. 5. The historical influences in relation to my Code Review and the historical contextual material in Sutton stimulated my interest in the wider influences on the development of commerce, insurance and law, with a central interest in the ethical foundations of the law and regulation. This aspect was also developed in the Masel Lecture and the article William Murray, Lord Mansfield: His Life, Times and Legacy – Good Faith and Good Works. 6. There had been a number of issues raised in my Code Review about mental illness, insurance and discrimination. I spoke at AIDA in Rome 2014 on Insurance Discrimination Law and the paper was published by AIDA. Then in 2016, the Australian Centre for Financial Studies commissioned me to write the ACFS MID Paper on the use by insurers of mental illness data. The historical perspective and the regulatory framework were important features of both papers. 7. A number of the Sutton themes were first opened out in my Professional Indemnity Insurance Law. The main themes were, in decreasing order of connection with Professional Indemnity Insurance Law, as follows. The first theme is the identification, development and application of the indemnity principle. The second is the adaptation and application of the analysis of contracts by primary and secondary obligations. This theme is in Sutton on the main concepts in insurance as well as liability insurance issues. The Liability Disputes Chapter condenses this thinking and account. The third theme was a renovation of how life insurance issues should be analysed and presented. This life insurance material was then adapted and infused with practical guidance on the decision making process on some issues for the FOS Life Insurance Manual. I developed an aspect of life insurance in the TPD Article. Each of these themes are in my submission original in concept and execution. Each has influenced the development of the law by legisation and the courts.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:754226
Date January 2017
CreatorsEnright, Walter Ian Brooke
ContributorsMerkin, Robert
PublisherUniversity of Exeter
Source SetsEthos UK
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Sourcehttp://hdl.handle.net/10871/33899

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