Publications

State and Federal Courts of Appeal Enforce Noncumulation Clauses

February 28, 2006
New York Law Journal

In the last quarter of 2005, the Court of Appeals for the State of New York and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued rulings enforcing the terms of a noncumulation clause, also sometimes known as an antistacking clause.

In both cases, the claimants sought damages for bodily injury and argued that their claim triggered consecutive insurance policies issued by the same insurer. In both rulings, the courts rejected the claimants’ attempts to access, or stack, the limits from each of the consecutive policies and confined the insurers’ liability to the limits of a single insurance policy.