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Professor French co-authors insurance law casebook

Professor of Practice Christopher C. French is co-author of a new casebook on insurance law, and law students Victoria Veatch, Katrina Feller, and Kyle Kenny provided research and editing assistance in the preparation of the book.
Professor French with the students who assisted him with his book

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – A new casebook co-authored by Christopher C. French, professor of practice at Penn State Law, and Robert H. Jerry II, Isidor Loeb Professor of Law at the University of Missouri School of Law, draws on the authors’ nearly 60 collective years of teaching and practicing insurance law.

The book, Insurance Law and Practice: Cases, Materials, and Exercises, was published in January by West Academic Publishing. Penn State Law 2L students Katrina Feller, Kyle Kenny, and Victoria Veatch provided research and editing assistance in the preparation of the book.

With French’s more than two decades of experience litigating and trying insurance coverage claims, the book is written from both academic and practice-oriented perspectives, allowing it to be used as a teaching text in either a doctrinal insurance law course or in a more experiential course.  

The casebook covers traditional insurance law topics, including:

  • insurance contract formation and interpretation,
  • insurance regulation,
  • insurable interest,
  • bad faith insurer breaches,
  • property insurance,
  • life insurance,
  • disability insurance,
  • commercial general liability insurance,
  • claims made liability insurance, and
  • auto insurance.

It also includes sections on topics in insurance law that are less commonly found in casebooks, including:

  • choice of law,
  • personal and advertising liability coverage for intentional torts and intellectual property infringement claims,
  • proofs of loss,
  • examinations under oath,
  • efficient proximate cause,
  • ensuing loss clauses,
  • anti-concurrent causation exclusions, and
  • business interruption insurance.

About the Authors

Christopher C. French has written extensively in the area where insurance law intersects with contract and tort law, and he currently teaches Torts, Contracts, Remedies, and Insurance Law. He has published numerous articles in law review journals at Georgia State University, University of Nevada, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California, and University of Virginia, among other law schools, and he is the primary author of Insurance Law in a Nutshell and the author of numerous chapters of a two-volume insurance law treatise, Policyholder’s Guide to the Law of Insurance Coverage. Before coming to Penn State Law, French taught at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and Villanova Law School, and was a former partner at K&L Gates LLP, where he worked as a commercial litigator.

Robert H. Jerry is the author of numerous books, book chapters, articles, and essays in the field of insurance law, including the 1,000-plus-page treatise Understanding Insurance Law, which went to a fifth edition in 2012. At the University of Missouri School of Law, he is a senior fellow with the Center for Dispute Resolution, where he is developing an insurance dispute resolution subspecialty. He teaches courses including Insurance Law, Lawyering, Insurance Claims Processing and Dispute Resolution, Contracts, and Advanced Topics in Insurance. 

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