Hunton Insurance Recovery Blog

Listeria is a bacterium that can infect humans and cause intestinal illness and other harm. So when might listeria not qualify as a “communicable disease” under an insurance policy? According to a federal court in Oregon, the answer may turn on an exclusion for “any infectious and/or contagious disease[.]” (emphasis added). In Scottsdale Insurance Co. v. Bruce Packing Co., the policy’s use of the conjunctive and disjunctive “and/or” rendered the exclusion ambiguous and, thus, inapplicable to a lawsuit alleging bodily injury from listeria.

The decision is a useful reminder that coverage exclusions and limitations must be written clearly and precisely and that a failure to do so may render them inapplicable.

New Jersey has some of the strongest consumer-protection laws in the nation. The state’s courts, however, had created judicial carve-outs for professionals and semi-professionals, exempting them from liability under those laws. Those carve-outs expressly included insurance brokers, whom the courts classified as semi-professionals.

That changed in Lowe v. Audet.

A coverage extension ordinarily does what its title suggests: it extends coverage beyond the standard policy form. But what happens when an insurer tries to use an insurance extension to exclude coverage? That was the question in Parsons v. Crum & Forster Specialty Insurance Company, in which the Indiana Court of Appeals held that the same principles limiting broad pollution exclusions also apply when an insurer invokes a pollution coverage extension to narrow coverage. The result was a significant victory for the policyholder.