PREFACE

Due mainly to the world war, the automobile, and workmen's compensation statutes, the scope of insurance activity has widened tremendously during the last decade. The multiplication of hazards in some directions and the reduction of them in others have created new types of policies or introduced novel clauses into old ones. This is especially noticeable in the life, accident, industrial, commercial and liability fields. Although it is still too early for this development to have affected the legal doctrine to any great extent, many unique insurance problems have already pressed the courts for solution. An effort has been made in this book to take account of these trends.

The classification of the material in this work does not follow conventional lines. In the first place personal and property insurance are developed separately. It has been thought expedient to give the student a completed picture of the personal insurance relationship before diverting him into other branches of the subject. To jump from life to fire insurance, then to marine, and then back to life is too much like the circus performer trying to ride the elephant, the bear, and the kangaroo at the same time. Is there not a life insurance "atmosphere" and technique that can be acquired only by an intimate and continuous contact with that subject? Is not life insurance, in the main, sufficiently dissimilar from property insurance in both its economic and legal aspects, to justify separate treatment? Of course, as one branch of the subject is developed, valuable analogies and comparisons may be drawn from the other, but it is believed there is a pedagogical advantage in following the thread of development in one field to its end, before beginning another.

In general, the order in which the material in each field is presented is as follows: (1) The facts operating to create the relation of insurer and insured; (2) the beneficial legal relations (primarily rights and powers) created by such facts, prior to maturity, in the various parties (e. g., in the insurer, insured, beneficiary, assignee, creditor, and the state) ; (3) facts constituting maturity of the policy (e. g., in personal insurance, death, accident, disability) ; and (4) legal relations created by maturity. Teaching convenience, however, has required a departure from this outline in

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