Abraham on the Legal Architecture of Insurance

Ken Abraham has posted to SSRN The Legal Architecture of Insurance. The abstract provides:

This piece, invited by the Michigan State Law Review as its 2025 “Visionary Article in Insurance,” examines the legal “architecture” of insurance. Insurance policies embody the architecture of insurance. They are its blueprints. Consequently, the Article begins with the history of insurance in the United States, which leads to the single most important feature of insurance architecture: the standardization of coverage, especially in property-casualty insurance. The Article next addresses what this history has yielded: the design and structure of contemporary insurance policies. With these features of insurance structure on the table, the Article then explores the insurance process, emphasizing the interaction between problems of imperfect information and the principles of interpretation that govern the meaning and application of insurance policy language. Finally, the Article illustrates the way in which these insights figure in the analysis of actual insurance problems by examining two insurance issues. The first is of considerable historical and doctrinal significance: the property insurance claims arising out of the attacks on and collapse of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001. The second poses contemporary jurisprudential and policy issues: the problem of overbroad exclusions in a variety of different kinds of insurance policies.