Restatement of European Insurenc Contract Law

The goal of this project is to draft a Restatement of European Insurance Contract Law. Within the framework of this Restatement, principles common to this field shall be worked out in a comparative approach and serve as a foundation for a uniform model of rules which is well founded from a scientific point of view. In particular, the example which serves as orientation for this project are the activities of the so-called Lando-Commission, named after its inaugurator, Prof. Ole Lando; it has meanwhile presented an interim result of its work in form of the volume on "Principles of European Contract Law, Part I - Performance, Non-performance and Remedies". Whereas the aforementioned work deals with the general law of obligations, no such research has been undertaken so far in the field of insurance contract law which is the subject of this application. Yet there is a dire need for this kind of research also from the viewpoint of EC Law. The realization of the Internal Market necessarily encompasses the insurance Industry. The free movement of services pursuant to Art 59 - 66 EC-Treaty has, however, not been realized in the field of insurance by the unification of laws. The reasons therefore were differing regulatory interests of the Member States and that scientific groundwork was lacking or not yet full-blown. Instead of unifying substantive law, `the approach of harmonizing the. private international law of insurance contracts was pursued and realized by means of the so- called Second and Third Generation of Directives in the field of non-life and fife insurance. In the meantime, the EC Commission itself has admitted that the goal of realizing freedom of services by means of a conflict-of-laws approach has failed. One of the reasons is the unnecessary complexity of the rules. Over the medium term, the obligations laid down in Art 59 - 66 EC-Treaty can therefore only be fulfilled by creating a uniform insurance contract law. The current project is based - among others - on extensive previous comparative research of which the results are to be published in the chapter "Insurance Contracts" of the International Encyclopaedia of Comparative Law. In order to realize the current project, international co-operation on a broad basis is envisaged.