The recent financial crisis demonstrated that, contrary to longstanding regulatory assumptions, nonbank financial firms — such as investment banks and insurance companies — can propagate systemic risk throughout the financial system. After the crisis, policymakers in the United States and...

The central goal of insurance law is to clarify, produce, and disseminate information about the scope of insurers' coverage obligations to policyholders. This Article examines how insurance law and regulation seek to achieve these objectives, and to what ends. To do so, it distinguishes among...

Insurance companies are in the business of discrimination. Insurers attempt to segregate insureds into separate risk pools based on their differences in risk profiles, first, so that they can charge different premiums to the different groups based on their risk and, second, to incentivize risk...

This Article empirically debunks the common claim that homeowners insurance policies do not vary across different insurance carriers. It demonstrates that different carriers' homeowners policies differ radically with respect to numerous important coverage provisions. It also reports that a...

A central goal of insurance law and regulation is to promote clear, unambiguous, and comprehensible insurance policies in personal lines of coverage like auto, renters, and homeowners. Although few consumers read these policies at the time of purchase, comprehensible insurance policies can...

Standard form contracts are a pervasive feature of modern commercial life, for ordinary consumers and big businesses alike. Yet remarkably little is currently known about how and when these contracts evolve in response to judicial decisions that interpret and apply them in individual disputes....

In the complex modern financial system, individual investors rarely experience a clean, on-off choice between intermediation and disintermediation. Rather, retail investors must navigate a system presenting different degrees of intermediation, depending on the vehicle and transaction. Financial...