Hunton Insurance Recovery Blog

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s recent decision in Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance Co. v. RI Settlement Trust, No. 61 EAP 2024 (Pa. July 21, 2026), rejected three insurers’ attempts to avoid coverage for lawsuits alleging that hotel operators enabled or profited from sex trafficking based on Pennsylvania’s purported public policy against sex trafficking.

The court found that Pennsylvania had no such articulated public policy against insuring those kinds of claims and, absent an exclusion barring coverage for the alleged conduct, the insurance contract would be enforced as written. The ruling is an important reminder for policyholders that courts will enforce the agreed-upon language in policies and will not allow insurers to deny coverage by invoking insurability defenses to eliminate coverage without a clearly articulated public policy in the relevant jurisdiction.