This site will work and look better in a browser that supports web standards, but it is accessible to any browser or Internet device.

Insurance Law Center

Today, insurance demands our attention. Wise policy for dealing with catastrophic risks, global warming, the balance between state and federal regulation, the growing prominence of international insurance markets and foreign insurers, health care reform, the reorganization of the financial services marketplace, tort reform, pension reform, Social Security reform, and other pressing policy problems requires a detailed understanding of insurance law and institutions. What is the appropriate balance between private and public insurance for natural disasters and terrorism? What is the difference between a mutual fund, a bank, or an insurance company? Is our current regulatory system doing its job? Should health care providers be regulated as if they were in the insurance business? Should public insurance programs invest in private securities? These are among the many issues that comprise the work of the Insurance Law Center.

From Lord Mansfield's restructuring of marine insurance law in 18th century England to the current debates over the role of government in dealing with risk in the broadest sense, law has long marked the field on which insurance institutions play. Indeed, law and lawyers are central to insurance. Lawyers write and apply the governing statutes and regulations. Lawyers structure the deals creating and reforming private enterprise. Lawyers handle the inevitable disputes. And, as often as not, lawyers cross the elusive border between pure law work and policy or management.

"Insurance ideas and practices define central privileges and responsibilities within a society. In that sense, our insurance arrangements form a material constitution, one that operates through routine, mundane transactions that nevertheless define the contours of individual and social responsibility. For that reason, studying who is eligible to receive what insurance benefits, and who pays for them, is as good a guide to the social compact as any combination of Supreme Court opinions."

-Tom Baker, On the Genealogy of Moral Hazard, 75 Texas Law Review 237 (1996)

The Insurance Law Center and the University of Connecticut School of Law are now engaged in a world-wide search for a new Director and Connecticut Mutual Professor of Law. Professor Tom Baker led the Center for eleven years and turned the visions for the Center into reality. The new Director will build upon this foundation, as well as the Center's leadership in insurance law scholarship, its international reputation, its innovative distance-learning programs, and its strong financial base.