Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Litigation Blogs -> How Appealing

Litigation

: How Appealing

"The able lawyers who briefed and argued this case could have saved us some work and presented their positions more effectively had they done the translations from reinsurancese into everyday English themselves."

"The able lawyers who briefed and argued this case could have saved us some work and presented their positions more effectively had they done the translations from reinsurancese into everyday English themselves." Can Seventh Circuit Judge Richard A. Posner make an opinion deciding an appeal involving reinsurance both interesting and understandable? The answer seems to be yes.

For example, earlier in the opinion, Judge Posner writes:

One who voluntarily confers a benefit on another, which is to say in the absence of a contractual obligation to do so, ordinarily has no legal claim to be compensated. If while you are sitting on your porch sipping Margaritas a trio of itinerant musicians serenades you with mandolin, lute, and hautboy, you have no obligation, in the absence of a contract, to pay them for their performance no matter how much you enjoyed it; and likewise if they were gardeners whom you had hired and on a break from their gardening they took up their musical instruments to serenade you. When voluntary transactions are feasible (in economic parlance, when transaction costs are low), it is better and cheaper to require the parties to make their own terms than for a court to try to fix them--better and cheaper that the musicians should negotiate a price with you in advance than for them to go running to court for a judicial determination of the just price for their performance.

Perhaps the reinsurance lawyers were thinking that if Judge Posner was familiar with the musical instrument known as the hautboy, he'd be quite well-versed in obscure reinsurance terms as well.

Full post as published by How Appealing on January 16, 2008 (boomark / email).