Over the past 20 years or so, courts in this country and other common law jurisdictions have, on a relatively large number of occasions, been required to decide whether the insurers of a building project, exercising subrogation rights in the name of its insured, have been entitled to sue one or more of the parties engaged on the project who was/were responsible for the insured loss.1 Over the same sort of period, a number of other situations have raised similar issues. Of particular importance here have been cases where a landlord’s insurers have sued the tenants and mortgage indemnity insurers have sued the mortgagors, in both instances in the name of the insured.2 The “construction cases” seem generally to have been regarded as cases of co-insurance or composite insurance—that is when more than one person is insured under the same insurance policy—and as such to turn on questions arising out of the nature and construction of the insurance contract. On the other hand, the arguments in the other cases have generally proceeded on the basis of determining the rights of the parties to the underlying contract, not the insurance contract. On this basis, whether or not the real claimant is an insurer exercising subrogation rights should not matter; the issue is as to the rights of one of the parties to the separate contract and it is axiomatic that insurers can have no better rights than their insured.