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.

Last February, a Pennsylvania federal court ordered rescission of an accidental contamination and government recall insurance policy issued to the H.J. Heinz Company after Heinz sought $25 million from its insurer for its business interruption losses sustained due to lead in its baby cereal. The district court based the rescission on findings that Heinz materially misrepresented its claim history when it purchased the policy. Heinz claimed the incorrect information was an inadvertent error by its new Global Insurance Director. Although a jury agreed that Heinz’s errors were unintentional, the district court found that even unintentional material misrepresentations were sufficient to void the contract.