Restatement of European Insurance Contract Law II

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 is the activity of the so-called Lando-Commission (Ole Lando/Hugh Beale, Principles of European Contract Law, Part I + II, 2000). Whereas the aforementioned work deals with the general law of contracts, 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 an urgent need for this kind of research, too. It stems not the least 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 49 - 55 EC-Treaty has, however, not been realized in the field of insurance by the unification of laws. The reasons therefor 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 life insurance. In the meantime, however 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 49 - 55 EC-Treaty can therefore only be fulfilled by creating a uniform insurance contract law. The current project is carried out - as an international teamwork - by a Project Group of 17 internationally respected experts on insurance law from 13 European countries. The responsible management lies with the applicant as Chairman (resp. the Vice Chairman) and the Innsbruck bureau. Step by step, the articles of the Restatement are drafted on a comparative law basis, and put to extensive discussion in half-yearly workshops.

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 is the activity of the so-called Lando-Commission (Ole Lando/Hugh Beale, Principles of European Contract Law, Part I + II, 2000). Whereas the aforementioned work deals with the general law of contracts, 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 an urgent need for this kind of research, too. It stems not the least 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 49 - 55 EC-Treaty has, however, not been realized in the field of insurance by the unification of laws. The reasons therefor 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 life insurance. In the meantime, however 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 49 - 55 EC-Treaty can therefore only be fulfilled by creating a uniform insurance contract law. The current project is carried out - as an international teamwork - by a Project Group of 17 internationally respected experts on insurance law from 13 European countries. The responsible management lies with the applicant as Chairman (resp. the Vice Chairman) and the Innsbruck bureau. Step by step, the articles of the Restatement are drafted on a comparative law basis, and put to extensive discussion in half-yearly workshops.