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Insurance Law Center

Today, insurance demands our attention. Health reform, the reorganization of the financial services marketplace, tort reform, pension reform, Social Security reform, and other pressing aspects of law and public policy require a detailed understanding of insurance law and institutions. What is the difference between a mutual fund, a bank, or an insurance company? Are health care providers in the insurance business? Are insurance companies practicing medicine? Should public insurance programs invest in private securities? Can we trade the extension of health and disability insurance for tort law reform? These are among the many issues that comprise the work of the Insurance Law Center.

From Lord Mansfield's restructuring of marine insurance law in 18th century England to the U.S. Supreme Court's recent efforts to define the boundary between state and federal regulation of health benefits, law has long marked the field on which insurance institutions play. Indeed, law and lawyers are central to insurance. Lawyers write and apply the governing statutes and regulations. Lawyers structure the deals creating and reforming private enterprise. Lawyers handle the inevitable disputes. And, as often as not, lawyers cross the elusive border between pure law work and policy or management.

"Insurance ideas and practices define central privileges and responsibilities within a society. In that sense, our insurance arrangements form a material constitution, one that operates through routine, mundane transactions that nevertheless define the contours of individual and social responsibility. For that reason, studying who is eligible to receive what insurance benefits, and who pays for them, is as good a guide to the social compact as any combination of Supreme Court opinions."

-Tom Baker, On the Genealogy of Moral Hazard, 75 Texas Law Review 237 (1996)