What is at stake in taking responsibility? Lessons from third-party property insurance

Third-party property insurance (TPPI) protects insured drivers who accidentally damage an expensive car from the threat of financial ruin. Perhaps more importantly though, TPPI also protects the victims whose losses might otherwise go uncompensated. Ought responsible drivers therefore take out TPPI? This paper begins by enumerating some reasons for why a rational person might believe that they have a moral obligation to take out TPPI. It will be argued that if what is at stake in taking responsibility is the ability to compensate our possible future victims for their losses, then it might initially seem that most people should be thankful for the availability of relatively inexpensive TPPI because without it they may not have sufficient funds to do the right thing and compensate their victims in the event of an accident. But is the ability to compensate one's victims really what is at stake in taking responsibility? The second part of this paper will critically examine the arguments for the above position, and it will argue that these arguments do not support the conclusion that injurers should compensate their victims for their losses, and hence that drivers need not take out TPPI in order to be responsible. Further still, even if these arguments did support the conclusion that injurers should compensate their victims for their losses, then (perhaps surprisingly) nobody should to be allowed to take out TPPI because doing so would frustrate justice

Mandating Environmental Liability Insurance

Plant cuticles are extracellular membranes covering aerial organs of plants, whose main functions rely on the protection against water loss, mechanical injury from the environment, attack of microorganism, and also regulation of gas exchange. Among the several constituents of plant cuticles, waxes are those that play an important role in their barrier properties. In order to enhance the mechanical properties of wax, NFC was applied in. In the project, mainly two kinds of methods were used to prepare wax-NFC composites. One way was wax and NFC were dissolved in toluene and casted to be a film, another way was to prepare NFC aerogel firstly, and then, impregnated the aerogel into wax liquid. After pressing it the structure was more compact. In order to characterize the properties of samples, SEM, XRD, TGA, DSC, Contact angle testing, tensile test and oxygen permeability methods were applied in

Insurance Policies: The Grandparents of Contractual Black Holes

In their recent article, The Black Hole Problem in Commercial Boilerplate, Professors Stephen Choi, Mitu Gulati, and Robert Scott identify a phenomenon found in standardized contracts they describe as “contractual black holes.” The concept of black holes comes from theoretical physics. Under the original hypothesis, the gravitational pull of a black hole is so strong that once light or information is pulled past an event horizon into a black hole, it cannot escape. In recent years, the theory has been reformulated and now the hypothesis is that some information can escape, but it is so degraded that it is virtually useless. In their article, Choi, Gulati, and Scott apply the black hole concept to certain standardized contractual boilerplate provisions. Although the focus of their article is on the contractual black hole nature of pari passu clauses that are used in sovereign debt contracts, Choi, Gulati, and Scott note that “[s]tandard insurance contracts appear to be another area with the potential for terms that have lost meaning.” They are correct that insurance policies are an area in which contractual black holes would appear quite likely to develop. In this essay, to test the hypothesis that insurance policies potentially are, or contain, contractual black holes, four policy provisions found in commercial insurance policies are considered: 1) “Sue and Labor” Clauses, 2) “Ensuing Loss” Clauses, 3) “Non-Cumulation” Clauses, and 4) the “Sudden and Accidental” Pollution Exclusion. An examination of these provisions demonstrates that some policy provisions have become contractual black holes, some provisions are only apparent contractual black holes, and other provisions on their way to becoming contractual black holes were saved before the original meaning of such provisions crossed the event horizon

Audit report on the Peace Officers' Retirement, Accident and Disability System for the year ended June 30, 2009

Audit report on the Peace Officers' Retirement, Accident and Disability System for the year ended June 30, 200

Audit report on the Peace Officers' Retirement, Accident and Disability System for the year ended June 30, 2010

Audit report on the Peace Officers' Retirement, Accident and Disability System for the year ended June 30, 201