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Insurance Law Center Opens
The Insurance Law Center at the University of Connecticut School of Law has begun offering classes for a Master's Degree in Insurance Law this semester.
Hugh Macgill, dean of the Law School, said the Master's Degree program is the first of its kind in the country.
"The L.L.M. program will be the linchpin of the Insurance Law Center," Macgill says. "Unique in the United States, it will establish the University and the Law School as the center for academic study of the law and policy as they affect insurance throughout the world and will prepare lawyers to be experts in this complex and evolving area of the law."
The L.L.M. is an advanced legal degree beyond Juris Doctor.
"The center's goal is to assure that if someone anywhere in the world thinks about insurance law, they think of the University of Connecticut. And we are going to achieve that," says Tom Baker, director of the Insurance Law center and first holder of the Connecticut Mutual endowed chair in insurance law.
"Hartford is the logical city and the Law School is the logical place for the serious and systematic study of all aspects of law that bear upon insurance specifically and risk and responsibility more generally," says Chancellor mark A. Emmert. "The Law School established the Insurance Law Center to offer a curriculum in the field and to develop a program that would fit within the current entrepreneurial and strategic goals of the University."
Baker credits the vision of the center to Robert Googins, a former insurance executive and state insurance commissioner and an adjunct faculty member and founding director of the center.
The center has three components: the academic component, which includes insurance law courses and the L.L.M. program; publications and outreach, including a one-week insurance law institute for lawyers from across the country and the student-run Connecticut Insurance Law Journal; and a legal research component.
"Insurance is embedded in many legal and public issues," says Baker. "Whether it's auto insurance reform, Medicare reform--even the savings-and-loan crisis had an insurance element to it, because Federal Deposit Insurance was seen by some as a cause for the S&L crisis. When you look at our late 20th-century capitalist society, the institutions that deal with risk transfer--insurance companies--are one of the most important aspects of the economy. It's how we make sure the lucky take care of the unlucky, the way we reallocate resources to the unfortunate in our society. If that's the idea of insurance, then it's important to analyze whether that's really happening."
Baker says the center will build on ties to the Law School and the Hartford insurance community and also develop links to other important constituencies, including plaintiffs' lawyers who are involved in an adversarial relationship with the insurance industry. "As a neutral research institution we should reach out to everybody," he adds.
-Traditions, Fall 1998, Volume 4, Number 4, Page 8