Hunton Insurance Recovery Blog

“Loss or damage.” “Caused by or resulting from.” “Faulty, inadequate or defective.” “Direct physical loss of or damage to.”

In coverage litigation, phrases like these can launch a familiar argument: if an insurance policy uses two different words, each must mean something different. Otherwise, one of them is surplusage.

That argument can have force. But it does not always carry the day. As the Supreme Court cautioned in Rimini Street, Inc. v. Oracle USA, Inc., surplusage is an interpretive clue, not a trump card. The Court explained that where one interpretation would create redundancy and another would avoid it, that difference “can supply a clue as to the better interpretation,” but “only a clue,” because “[s]ometimes the better overall reading” “contains some redundancy.” 586 U.S. 334, 346 (2019).

That caution matters in insurance disputes. Policy language often reflects convention, repetition, and “belt and suspenders” drafting. Sometimes two words do separate work. Sometimes they provide emphasis, breadth, or continuity with familiar legal phrasing. And sometimes the harder question is not what independent meaning each word has in the abstract, but whether the policy, read as a whole and under governing law, actually assigns each word a distinct job.

Legal Doublets and Insurance Drafting

Legal English is full of paired phrases, also known as legal doublets. “Null and void.” “Cease and desist.” “Aid and abet.” “Assault and battery.” “Will and testament.”

These phrases are not accidents. As John Lupton, executive director of the Illinois Supreme Court Historic Preservation Commission, has explained, legal doublets developed from the mixed linguistic history of English law. After the Norman Conquest, legal language drew from Old English, French, and Latin. Lawyers often paired near-synonyms from different linguistic sources so legal commands would be understood across audiences and traditions. “Will and testament,” for example, joins an Old English term with a Latin-derived one.

Coverage lawyers would be wise to consider this history because it suggests that not all paired words necessarily have separate and independent meaning.

A Useful Doublet Footnote

Just recently, the D.C. Circuit captured the doublet playing field well in Make the Road New York v. Mullin. There, the court described “enjoin or restrain” as a “familiar legal doublet”—i.e., “a conventional pairing of terms for emphasis and breadth, not an invitation to parse each word for independent meaning.” 179 F.4th 16, 33 n.15 (D.C. Cir. 2026).

The court gave examples any lawyer would recognize, including “arbitrary and capricious” and “aid and abet.” Id. It then observed that “[t]he effect of a doublet is why no one has invoked the surplusage canon to hold that the term ‘capricious’ imposes some novel requirements not contained in the term ‘arbitrary.’” Id.

While Make the Road is analytically instructive, it should not be overread. Make the Road was not an insurance case, and policy interpretation turns on governing law, specific policy wording, and policy structure. Still, Make the Road is a timely reminder to coverage practitioners about the salience of legal doublets.

The Sixth Circuit’s Insurance-Specific Caution

TMW Enterprises, Inc. v. Federal Insurance Co. shows how this issue can arise in insurance policies. 619 F.3d 574 (6th Cir. 2010). There, the Sixth Circuit, applying Michigan contract law, considered policy wording involving “loss or damage,” “caused by or resulting from,” and “faulty, inadequate or defective” design, specifications, workmanship, repair, construction, renovation, remodeling, grading, or compaction. Id. at 577–78.

The Sixth Circuit rejected the idea that each word necessarily carried a separate meaning in that context. It described the wording as reflecting “systematic and formulaic precision, sometimes overdone precision,” and as a “belt and suspenders approach.” Id. at 577. The court did not discard the surplusage canon, but cautioned that it is “one among many tools for dealing with ambiguity, not a tool for creating ambiguity in the first place.” Id. at 578. That is a useful reminder in coverage disputes: anti-surplusage principles may help choose among plausible readings, but they do not necessarily convert overlapping insurance phrasing into ambiguity or require every neighboring word to carry independent legal weight.

The Takeaway

The canon against surplusage remains important in coverage disputes. Different words may signal different meanings, especially where the policy defines them separately or uses them differently.

But insurance policies often contain overlapping language, sometimes by design and sometimes by convention. Before treating every variation in wording as dispositive, coverage lawyers should ask whether the policy actually makes the distinction matter.

At bottom, in the right case, surplusage may unlock the policy. In another, it may place too much weight on language that was never meant to bear it.