Put broadly, insurance is a contractual process whereby risk is transferred from a person who might incur a loss to an insurer. Whilst insurance law is at root merely an example of applied contract, in fact it has some unique characteristics and practices and a terminology all of its own. In this chapter we will consider the key characteristics of insurance law. After examining the meaning of insurance, including the concepts of indemnity and insurable interest in liability and property insurance, we move to the structure of insurance policies. The ways the courts have interpreted insurance wordings and insurance warranties, conditions precedent, and basis of the contract clauses are dealt with before the extensive reforms wrought by the Insurance Act 2015 are introduced. Insurance policies, even so-called all risks policies, do not cover all causes of loss which an insured might suffer, so the concept of causation in insurance is particularly important and this is dealt with next. The chapter closes by reviewing insurance claims, including the effect of fraudulent claims, how the level of disclosure expected of an insured is far higher than in a non-insurance context, and how these issues have been the subject of substantial reform under the newInsurance Act.
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Additional Chapter Principles of Insurance Law
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10. Competition Act 1998 and the cartel offence: public enforcement and procedure
This chapter describes the system of public enforcement under the Competition Act 1998. It begins with a consideration of the way in which inquiries and investigations are carried out under the Competition Act. After a section on complaints, the chapter examines the extent to which it may be possible to receive guidance from the CMA on the application of the Act. Section 5 describes the enforcement of the Competition Act. Section 6 deals with the criminal law cartel offence and section 7 with company director disqualification, a tool that the CMA has used several times in recent years. Section 8 deals with the sectoral regulators’ concurrent powers, with the CMA, to apply the Chapter I and Chapter II prohibitions in the Competition Act in the sectors for which they are responsible. Section 9 describes the system of appeals under the Competition Act. The chapter incorporates the amendments to the Competition Act made by the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024.
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8. Articles 101 and 102: private enforcement in the courts of Member States
This chapter describes the private enforcement of competition law, that is to say, the situation where litigants take their disputes to a domestic court or, quite often, to arbitration. Section 2 deals with the private enforcement of Articles 101 and/or 102 as a matter of EU law, with particular emphasis on the Damages Directive. Section 3 deals with private actions in the UK courts. Section 4 considers the use of competition law not as a ‘sword’, where the claimant’s cause of action is based on an infringement of competition law, but rather as a ‘shield’, that is to say as a defence, for example to an action for breach of contract or infringement of an intellectual property right. Section 5 contains a brief discussion competition law and arbitration.
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5. Article 102
This chapter discusses the main features of Article 102 of the Treaty of Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), which is concerned with the abusive conduct of dominant firms. It begins by discussing the meaning of ‘undertaking’ and ‘effect on trade between Member States’ in the context of Article 102. It then considers what is meant by a dominant position and looks at the requirement that any dominant position must be held in a substantial part of the internal market. Thereafter it discusses some general considerations relevant to the concept of abuse of dominance, followed by an explanation of what is meant by ‘exploitative’, ‘exclusionary’ and ‘single market’ abuses. It then discusses possible defences to allegations of abuse, and concludes by considering the consequences of infringing Article 102.
