Lloyd's Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly
BOOK REVIEW - MACGILLIVRAY ON INSURANCE LAW (13TH EDITION)
James Davey
MacGillivray on Insurance Law (13th edition). John Birds, Emeritus Professor, University of Manchester; Ben Lynch, Fountain Court Chambers, and Simon Milnes, 20 Essex Street Chambers. Sweet & Maxwell, London (2015) clxviii and 1250 pp, plus 59 pages index. Hardback £435.
The current calendar year may be most significant in insurance since the entry into force of the Marine Insurance Act 1906, and with it come new editions of the leading insurance texts. The first new edition out of the blocks is MacGillivray, with Colinvaux due shortly and Clarke’s Law of Insurance Contracts being updated incrementally. The difficulty for the editorial teams involved is how much of the new law to add alongside references to the old. For those unfamiliar with the Insurance Act 2015, it will be the second legislative product of the ongoing Law Commission review of insurance law to enter into force after the Consumer Insurance (Disclosure and Representations) Act 2012. But the authors cannot even have been certain of the future state of the law once the 2015 Act had received royal assent, as the Enterprise Act 2016 has made amendments to the 2015 Act even before it has entered into force, to incorporate a duty to pay claims in a timely manner. Alongside this, parliamentary work continues on amendments to the Third Party (Rights Against Insurers) Act 2010 to bring it into shape so that it can be enter into force.
I hope this conveys the sense of flux in insurance contract law. For a system of rules that has remained remarkably unchanged for the 250 years since Lord Mansfield decided Carter v Boehm (1766) 3 Burr 1905 and similar seminal cases, this is unprecedented. Moreover, the Law Commission is expected to produce further recommendations on the doctrine of insurable interest in the near future. Alongside this statutory upheaval comes significant judicial reconsideration of the rules relating to fraudulent claims, the relationship between tort and compulsory insurance and the continuing challenges of satisfactorily implementing EU motor insurance rules. In most cases, contracting parties (or at least, their advisers) will need to appreciate both the pre-2015 law and the new approach, as many disputes will continue to arise on the established principles, either because the contract pre-dates the 2015 Act or because parties have elected to restore the 1906 Act position by contractual provision.
The entirely commendable approach of the editors of MacGillivray was to deal with the law as they found it at the time of writing. The decision to isolate commentary on the 2015 Act (and its companion CIDRA 201) in distinct chapters is useful. The 2015 Act in particular is novel not just in the changes it makes to substantive insurance rules, but in its method. It is not—as the 1906 Act—an attempt to capture current practice in simple
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