L&E Blog: The International Center for Law & Economics

As Global Temperatures Set New Records, Policyholder Advocates Continue to Deny the Science

We learned this week that July 4’s average global temperature of 62.92 degrees Fahrenheit was the world’s hottest day since at least 1979, when the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction began keeping records, and potentially the hottest in about …

Prop 103’s Author Isn’t the Final Word on What Prop 103 Says

It’s been 35 years since Californians voted by a narrow majority to pass Proposition 103, completely overhauling how the nation’s largest state regulates the business of insurance. That’s an awfully long time. So long, it seems, that even the man …

Please, Fake News, Don’t Give Insurance Regulators Any Bright Ideas

A relatively minor bureaucratic change proposed by the Federal Housing Finance Agency stirred up a viral storm in right-leaning news media recently, with outlets like the Washington Times, New York Post, National Review and Fox News all reporting some variant …

Live by Prop 103, Die by Prop 103

Wildfire has hit Assemblymember Damon Connolly’s (D-San Rafael) Northern California district particularly hard in recent years, including the devastating Glass and LNU Lightning Complex fires in 2020, the Nuns and Tubbs fires in 2017, and the Valley fire in 2015. …

Illinois Considers Slaughtering the Golden Goose of Competition

How it is that Illinois, a jurisdiction not typically associated with a strong commitment to free-market principles, came to be the first state in the nation to allow its insurance rates to be regulated entirely by open competition is something …

Has Sarbanes-Oxley Made Insurance Riskier?

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX)—named for its chief sponsors, former Sen. Paul Sarbanes (D–Md.) and former Rep. Mike Oxley (R–Ohio)—was intended to restore trust in the transparency of publicly traded companies after the collapses of WorldCom and Enron Corp. …

Nation’s First Gun-Insurance Mandates Take Effect. Will They Hold up in Court?

As the calendar flips to 2023, among the scores of new laws taking effect are a pair of legislative mandates that would, for the first time anywhere in the country, require firearms owners to obtain and maintain liability insurance. What …

How Do You Solve a Problem Like California?

California has a wildfire crisis. Arguably, the entire Western United States has a wildfire crisis, but California’s crisis is of an entirely different magnitude. California also has a homeowners insurance crisis. That crisis began in 2019, when nonrenewals of residential …

Could the Ukraine Crisis Move Florida to Fix Its Insurance Crisis?

With the March 11 scheduled close of its regular session fast approaching, the Florida Legislature remains so focused on putting the finishing touches on its various culture-war signaling bills that one might think Tallahassee hasn’t noticed that the state’s property …

Could the Musk-Lara Smackdown Offer a Way Forward on Prop 103?

When an obscure provision of a state’s 1988 insurance law makes the news, it’s often confined to the pages of Insurance Journal. However, when the world’s richest man tweets about that law in the course of a Twitter spat with …

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