Last week, we drilled down on the Supreme Court’s tort cases, looking year by year at what sub-areas of tort law produced the Court’s cases.  This week, we’re doing the same thing for the Court’s docket of insurance cases.  We’re dividing the field of insurance law into six sub-areas: coverage; separate torts against insurers (outside of coverage under the policy – mostly bad faith); exclusions; defenses; regulatory; and “other.”

We begin with the first fifteen years of our period of study: 1990-2004.  During those years, the Court decided 51 insurance law cases.  Thirty-one of those cases involved coverage questions.  Coverage cases were roughly flat throughout the period – usually 1-3 cases a year, with the exception of four cases in 2001.  The next most common sub-issues on the Court’s docket were separate torts and regulatory issues – six each.  The Court decided only four cases involving defenses to coverage.  The Court decided two cases involving exclusions and two which fell in the “other” category.

Join us back here tomorrow as we review the data for the years 2005 through 2019.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Don Graham (no changes).