Judges - Snippets

  • 2013 0905 - LC - Johnston & Johnston v. Conseco - 5th Circuit Court of Appeals - 13-30010 - Oral Argument - mp3  ---  [BonkNote]  ---  [link-mp3-audio]
    • 20 - Judge Carl Stewart - usually the Policy Due Date is not a mystery.  The amount of the premium.  What did the parties bargain for….drain cash surrender policy… what was the point of the buying the policy…. You just have a piece of paper…..
    • 40 - Judge Carolyn King: My Father said: Don't ever buy a Flexible Premium policy, he was right on the money.
  • [Re: State Guaranty Funds]
  • 2021 1008 - In Re: Penn Treaty Network America - No. 1 PEN 2009 - Insurance Company in Liquidation Liquidator's Brief in Support of Exceptions - 456p
    • 2015 0511 - Proceedings Taken May 11, 2015
    • THE COURT, Mary Hannah Leavitt: What's going to happen when the guarantee associations take over these policies is that their policyholders, who had nothing to do with this insolvency, are going to make up the difference.
      • Guarantee associations get their money from insurance companies.
        • Insurance companies get their money from their policyholders; so you are shifting the burden from one set of policyholders to another.
      • That's a policy decision that's been made by the legislature, but I think there are problems with holding it up as a model of equity and fairness.
        • In a global sense I don't think it is very fair; but it doesn't matter because we are not here to talk about the wisdom of the legislature.
      • We are really here to decide what the legislature has decided we must do in this circumstance.  
    • MS. GLAWE: Exactly right.
      • That burden shifting is what the legislature and 52 jurisdictions have decided.
    • THE COURT: That's right.
    • MS. GLAWE: So that --
    • THE COURT: I wouldn't hold it up as a wonderful thing.
      • That's all I'm saying.
      • For every upside there's a downside on someone.
  • Justice Holmes once declared “that all contracts are formal, that the making of a contract depends not on the agreement of two minds in one intention, but on the agreement of two sets of external signs—not on the parties’ having meant the same thing but on their having said the same thing.”
    • Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Path of the Law, 110 Harv. L. Rev. 991, 996 (1997) (reprint of address given at Boston University School of Law on January 8, 1897). 

ca4.uscourts.gov/opinions/201187.P.pdf - Rowlands v  - UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT